Formatting, tabs vs spaces.

[Paolo Carlini]

... so you are really following me in my nitpicking passion. Good, good ;)

Seriously, I think the general answer is easy: never use by-hand spaces. When you use a normally configured emacs, for example, you *never* press the spacebar for formatting purposes, only to separate words. In fact, since emacs is The reference GNU programmers tool, I would suggest just using it as such and configure any other tool to mimic its behavior.

Paolo.