Simple: it's hell to automate. My process is as follows: - tabs allow for custom settings - tabs need spaces to allow for alignment, because previous

Simple: it's hell to automate. My process is as follows: - tabs allow for custom settings - tabs need spaces to allow for alignment, because previous - automatically deciding what constitutes alignment vs indent is a non-trivial problem, highly dependent on the language† - using spaces throughout is worse theoretically because it flattens the theoretical problem but solves impedance mismatch - therefore I use spaces and am all the merrier in every practical use case - except for languages who make dash 3 easy (such as Go thanks to gofmt) - except for projects I have no say in, where I respect the will of the maintainers, because conventions among well-behaved people matter more than my highly individual opinion. † to which the usual answer is "but your editor sucks with lang X", well too bad, I'd rather have pragmatic editor portability than have perfect language parsing in every editor being a pipe dream I hinge upon.