> Or maybe we could go back in time and murder both hitler and the person who decided that tabs should be a separate character (which I wouldn't be surprised if

> Or maybe we could go back in time and murder both hitler and the person who decided that tabs should be a separate character (which I wouldn't be surprised if they were the same person). You got the timeline almost right. A tab and a space are not only different characters, they are not even in the same category of characters. A space is a whitespace character whereas a tab is a control character that moves the cursor to a specific position. Its name is an indicator for what it was used in the beginning, to arrange data in a tabular form. The real problem is that many editors don't show tabs differently from spaces. In vim you can do a lot with the options "listchars". My settings there are: set list listchars=tab:>-,eol:$,nbsp:~,trail:X