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▲ quietbritishjim a day ago

Like if my tabs are 2 spaces and I save a file like this:

   line1 = wrapped
     + to_here_max
   if something:
     another_line
       = some_val
       + other
Of course this is exaggerated, especially because most lines won't be close to max width let alone exactly at it. But you can set the width of your editor to whatever number of columns that you're hard wrapping to (i.e. what you save in the file) and be sure every line will fit.

Then someone else loads it with tab width set to 6:

   line1 = wrapped
         + to_here_max
   if something:
         another_line
               = some_val
               + other
Now the max column width of a line depends on the syntactic indentation level of it! Any width you choose for your editor will either overflow for some deeply nested lines or waste loads of space on less-nested lines.

Of course it's not a real concern because your editor can probably automatically fix this. But if it's clever enough to do that, then the supposed extra flexibility of tabs is actually possible with spaces anyway.