Re: Whitespace cleanup

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/23/2012 08:02 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> It's a minor annoyance I'd
> like to at least fix in Emacs's own source code.

The .dir-locals.el file does fix that in Emacs's own source code.

If you'd like to use a tab-width of 8 everywhere for Elisp code,
you can put a find-file-hook into your .emacs file, to do that.

> what is the point of having tabs at all

Originally, I think tab==8 was partly as a convenience when
typing makefiles and C files, and partly to save memory.  It still
has these functions, though admittedly this is not a big deal these
days, for most purposes.  Some other GNU projects have decided
to expand tabs to spaces (except for makefiles and changelogs,
where they're part of the format), but the Emacs developers are
relatively conservative about making changes like that, and I
doubt whether this discussion will change things.

As you say, it's only a minor annoyance.