[webo]

You just described spaces for indentation.

A tab is a special ascii character, which most IDE's replace with spaces if you want to (like you described).

[nerdwaller]

I believe you are misunderstanding what they're saying. they are saying you use the special characters and your editor can display it as you please (2char wide or 4char wide). if you literally replace the tab char with N spaces, my editor will now show it as N spaces.