[d110af5ccf]

I used to feel very strongly about this. Then I started using Common Lisp and discovered the abomination that is tabstop. This archaic "feature" leads to tab width that varies across the line and seems to be hardcoded in every text editor out there. Worse, it's only useful if using tabs for alignment which is completely broken anyway! At some point I intend to patch the source for the editors I use to remove this nonsense.

Admittedly this is something of an edge case - how many languages other than Lisps involve alternating layers of indentation and alignment? The more common C like languages don't suffer from this at all.

At this point I'm largely convinced that more or less all of our tools, languages, and conventions are poorly thought out, brittle, and inelegant. /rant

[lispm]

usually I turn off tabs for indentation in Lisp editors. On a Lisp Machine:

  (setq zwei:*indent-with-tabs* nil)