On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 12:13 AM, Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>wrote:

> On 04/21/2014 12:10 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Why untabify at all?  Using tabs and spaces is the default GNU coding
> > style, so why should we stray from that?
>
> In Lisp code, using tabs makes no sense: code is frequently lined up
> precisely, so you get a mixture of tabs and spaces anyway, making it
> impossible to use a different tab-width.


+1, especially since we specify (tab-width . 8) in trunk/.dir-locals.el.

 > (It's an uphill battle you'll lose anyway, because many people, yours
> > truly included, have indent-tabs-mode set non-nil,
>
> Don't do that then.
>

I've sometimes wondered why trunk/.dir-locals.el doesn't also specify
indent-tabs-mode, but I found the rationale in this thread[0] from
several years ago.  Still, it would be nice to find a way to avoid the
battle Eli mentioned so people could C-x h C-M-\ with less risk that
their personal indentation preferences would introduce gratuitous
whitespace changes.

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-01/msg00058.html

Josh