IDLE/Tk Text widget question

[Robert]

Hi,
    I've finally decided to use IDLE and also to learn Tk (I normally use
MFC and VC++ for GUI stuff, python for text based stuff).

    I think IDLE is a great IDE and all, but there is one thing that is
annoying, that is actually I suspect a problem with Tk. In any EditorWindow,
a manually inserted tab defaults to 8 spaces even though autoindent defaults
to
 (I think) 4, which I much more prefer. I've looked at the text widget doc
and
it appears that to manually set tab stops, you need to use 'screen units' of
cm, in, points, etc. but not characters. Am I missing something? How could
the
default spacing be 8 characters/spaces and yet there is no way to specify
units of characters?

Robert