> Sure, if people would only ever use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, things could be good. But this almost never happens, instead: ... some line

> Sure, if people would only ever use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, things could be good. But this almost never happens, instead: ... some lines start with spaces, some with tabs. People using tabs for alignment can happen when you've got a tab-camp-person who hasn't yet realized how they're terrible for alignment. But "some lines start with spaces, some with tabs" happens for precisely two reasons: * you have a codebase with contributors from both camps * people thought in-editor tooling was the solution (now you have two problems) > Spaces have no corner cases whatsoever This is tooling and (as you realized) stop preference dependent.