spaces will always look consistent between various applications
for example, on b12 here tabs are 8 spaces and in notepad++ they're 4
so i just go with 4 spaces
Yeah, see, this is what I'm talking about though. At work, everyone uses tabs. I had to modify a number of libraries we didn't write a few times, and they were tabinated using two spaces. The code was much harder to read for me since I'm used to 4-space tabs. If it was tabinated using tabs, then the authors could write their scrunched up code and I could read it like I'm used to.
Maybe Notepad++ supports automatic conversion of tabs and spaces on existing code on the fly, like described above, but I don't think so. Maybe a plugin exists for it.
Additionally, I can do shift+tab to undo 4 indentions!
Many IDEs I've used supported that for blocks of code, but I don't think Notepad++ supports doing it for single lines. I'll have to test that in the morning. In any case, I'm so used to backspace removing a whole tab that it would be pretty annoying to retrain myself for that.
Another thing about spaces is that I usually screw up selecting blocks of code. I'll select one more or less space than I intended to.
I don't know, I guess it feels like IDEs have to jump through a lot of hoops to make spaces behave like tabs, when you could just use tabs.
Having said all of this, I think tabs are good for formatting comments next to lines of code. That way you can guarantee that they line up if you need them to. But for indentation, I just don't see any advantage to using spaces, and lots of annoyance.
Python hates tabs. That's why a lot of people don't like it. Because of one language that couldn't be arsed to use proper delimiters, which isn't so bad in itself, has caused real tab characters to clash wherever it comes up.
I'm pretty sure that Python accepts tabs just fine, but I don't think you can mix it with spaces in the same source file. Doing so is a deadly sin in any language though.