This is simply to register my conversion from a tabs-to-spaces guy to a tabs guy, thanks largely to finding Nick Gravgaard’s elastic tabstops page, which also turned me on to Input, a “a proportional programming font”.

Previously I fell for tab conversion to spaces since I thought fewer types of space was simpler and led to fewer complications due to accidentally mixed tabs and spaces. But now I see the folly of that line of thinking. Complications are really no fewer, but what is certain is using many spaces where a single tab would suffice is a waste of semantic potential and file space.

I stumbled on elastic tabstops when I was trying to find a way to get Vim to line up tabs so I could edit a tab separated spreadsheet as if it were in Excel but without any of the annoyances unfamiliar in plain text.

Now I need to develop a workflow that can use these developments!