[Arelius]

Yes, this. Which the counter point is either, Don't align things, or use tabs for indentation, and spaces for alignment.

And maybe you can enforce no alignment, but that's a hard fight to win.

And as far as tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, I've found no practical way to enforce this via tooling/linting. And a rule without enforcement becomes inconsistent, which is how we get files full of mixtures of spaces and tabs, which is how people get frustrated with tabs, and we decide to throw it all out.

And inevitably, that's part of how spaces "won"

[camel-cdr]

Disallowing /[^\t]\t/ and /^ / is a good start.

[ytpete]

These regexes don't solve what I think is one of the major common problems/complaints though: using extra tabs past the logical indent point as a shortcut to avoid typing so many spaces for alignment purposes.

To take this example from a sibling post:

  if (foo) {
  »   frobnicate(bar,
  »   ...........baz);
  }

Many people will wind up doing this:

  if (foo) {
  »   frobnicate(bar,
  »   »   »   ...baz);
  }

And then your alignment is all messed up if you have a different tabs setting.

Checking for that requires something more like a linter with a detailed understanding of the syntax parse tree.

[throwawayqqq11]

Or dont try to align lines with different indentation levels.

Addind a comment with the right amount of tabs as a table header and align all fields with spaces after the tabs would do the trick.

[pepa65]

It would be crazy that spaces would have "won" because of the silly idiosyncratic alignment that some people seem to like and then teach to others for many decades.