Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be

…except when they don’t. Many common environments have a hardcoded tab size of 8, which is insanely big for using it for indentation.

What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size? I haven’t seen this since typewriters.

Some projects just use tabs as a compressed form of 8 spaces. But that is a sin. Use tab to mean “one indent level” and align with spaces if you need to. (the occasional ASCII art diagram)

What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size?

• Termux
• SourceHut
• “View page source” in the browser

Termux

I think running tabs -N (where N is you preferred tab size) in the terminal should work. This is what I use in my zshrc on desktop.

SourceHut

Yup, they seem to be pretty opinionated here. If you look at the source there is just an inlined:

“View page source” in the browser

On Firefox this uses my default tab size of 4. But I guess changing this default isn’t user-friendly.

You can’t count it as good when it is unconfigurable when it happens to use your preference when the whole selling point of tabs is that they’re configurable.

I don’t understand what you are trying to say. I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn’t good. The other two are configurable and I have configured them to my preference on my machines.