Who are the "spacists"?

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Wildman <best_lay at yahoo.com>:

> On Tue, 21 Mar 2017 06:01:26 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> Can you ask your workmates to elaborate? I'd love to hear.
>
> I would love to hear also. I've been using Linux for about 10 years
> and I have never had anything "break" because of a tab. Sounds like a
> case of Chicken Little to me.

Example:

    - Start emacs with the default settings.

    - Edit buffer "abc": C-x C-b abc

    - Start drawing: M-x picture-mode

    - Draw this box starting from the top left corner and circling
      clockwise:

                +------------------+
		|		   |
		|		   |
     		+------------------+

    - Move the cursor to the beginning of the first line of the box.
      Try to move the box to the left by three columns:

          C-SPC C-n C-n C-n C-f C-f C-f C-x r k

      What you get is:

             +------------------+
		|		   |
		|		   |
  		+------------------+

      because only the first line was indented with spaces. Emacs uses
      when opening the other lines.

If you disable tabs (or untabify), you get the intended result:

             +------------------+
             |                  |
             |                  |
             +------------------+

This is only an example. Analogous annoyances crop up in all kinds of
editing.


Marko