[Github-comments] [geany/geany] Incorrectly identation width detection for tab characters (#1379)

[elextr]

A tab is a position, its not actually the "width" of a character, see [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key).  There is a computer convention that these positions be multiples of 8 ASCII spaces from back in the pre-unicode pre-web forms days.  The character just says "go to the next tab position".

So its completely a function of how its displayed.

Some editors allow specially formatted comments in files to define the tab position for files of some languages but thats not available in Geany.  It may be accepted if a well written pull request was proposed.

[WARNING personal rant]

But as it notes in the Wikipedia article, tabs are an artefact that mainly helped reduce the size of source files back when disks were 300k bytes.  But we are not so disk starved that we should care today. All tabs in source files should be replaced with spaces.  If you are starting a new project set your indents to spaces and have tab insert spaces.  Tabs in source files should die!!!

[end personal rant]

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