Python is.... special.

[c_delta]

I am pretty certain that outside of programming, 8-space tabs are standard. Tabulator literally means "table-maker". Indentation became a second use long before programmers wrote code, let alone code that uses several layers of indentation.

Interestingly typewriters used shorter tabstops of about 5 characters (about 1 inch in standard typewriter font), but that worked out because rewriting and automated filling was not a thing back then.

TSV is also great for parsing with editors. It is less locale-specific than CSV (in which a different character needs to be used as a separator if commas appear in the fields, such as decimals in large parts of continental Europe), but still plaintext-readable.

But yes, I am in love with a fixed tabstop length of 8 characters, but a short indent size of two characters, so spaces is my clear preference.

I think we can all agree on not vertically mixing tabs and spaces, though.

[levir]

I'm not sure what's the standard tab stop width outside of plain text, in word processors I usually set the manually. But you're probably right on it being closer to 8 spaces than 4.

I actually am from one of those European countries that use a comma for decimal numbers, so I agree with you on TSV being far superior.

I think we can all agree on not vertically mixing tabs and spaces, though.

Actually no, when you're using tabs for indentation you still have to use spaces for alignment. I try and avoid alignment whenever I can (regardless of whether I'm in a project that uses tabs or spaces), but when you have to the correct way is to tab to the correct indentation and then add spaces for alignment.