Who are the "spacists"?

Tue Mar 21 09:42:01 EDT 2017

Wildman <best_lay at yahoo.com>:
> On 2017年3月21日 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