DOS, UNIX and tabs

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <rolgp212fd1cshs8404v3c039he6hs4tvj at 4ax.com>, Tom Plunket wrote:

> Perhaps interestingly, for development I have my editor set to show tabs
> as fairly short, but my diff program shows them as eight characters.  I
> find that makes indentation changes easier to spot in the diffs.

I think there should be a single environment variable, perhaps
called "TABS", which specifies the tab settings across all relevant tools
that work with text, including less and diff. So for example setting this
as

    export TABS=4

will cause these tools to treat tabs as equivalent to stepping to the next
multiple of four columns from the start of the line.