The premise of the question is a little flawed. Most people just enforce a specific editor configuration via either a pre-commit git script or a plugin-based so

The premise of the question is a little flawed. Most people just enforce a specific editor configuration via either a pre-commit git script or a plugin-based solution like editorconfig. Once the configuration is enforced, you can configure many (most?) code editors to visualize the whitespace as desired (tabwidth/tabstop tend to be the features to look for).