[lethargic_meat]

Some IDEs will convert tabs to spaces when saving and the other way around when editing, so, while your approach is interesting, not really a proof of a majority choice.

Also my beef is specially with people who don't use tabs in files like fstab, like beasts.

[claudius]

For standard levels of indentation, I get that tabs may be useful, but in /etc/fstab, I absolutely hate them – how many do you put if the individual elements vary in size? Always just one, resulting in e.g.

    this_is_a_long_line<tab>defaults<tab>…
    short<tab>defaults<tab>…

with the following elements not aligning? Or however many are necessary to get things to align, which sort of destroys the semantic meaning?

[scrollaway]

I'd bet most of the code ever written gets styled however the IDE du jour decides to by default.

If some IDEs decided to switch to tab indent by default, people would suddenly love tabs.

[aplummer]

I think this definitely applies to xcode, I use tabs everywhere but for xcode it just prints a lot of spaces and I am used to it.