Actually, in theory the best solution would be an IDE that handles whitespace sufficiently flexibly that the actual encoding of the whitesapce doesn't matter an

Actually, in theory the best solution would be an IDE that handles whitespace sufficiently flexibly that the actual encoding of the whitesapce doesn't matter anymore. It has to reliably distinguish indentation whitespace from alignment whitespace. Then everyone could separately adjust the indentation to be N spaces in a codebase without needing to decide centrally on tabs/2spaces/4spaces etc.