I've always found the dislike of tabs to be quite strange. Developers love being explicit and semantic about things, and here we have a character that represents a semantic indent, and there's a huge swath of developers who prefer to go with the airy-fairy presentational space character instead. It even solves the 2-vs-4 debate with allowing each user to render it how they will. Heck, you could even render it as three spaces if you will!

It baffles me. Of course, at the end of the day it's just one IDE setting and I don't have to worry about it (we uses spaces at work and it's fine).

I'm on the fence about this syntax.

    var
        foo = 1,
        foo = 2;

The reason being that things will align whether you use a tabs with a width of 2 or 4.

I also use spaces for mid-line alignment and tabs exclusively for identation. I think this is called "smart tabs"?

I don't really care if people use tabs or spaces as long as the codebase is consistent, but aligning things in the middle of a line is my pet peeve. It's fiddly to maintain, it ruins source control because it requires you to edit many lines when you change one, and worst of all, it makes it impossible to use a proportional typeface.

It's very common to find mixed tabs and spaces where people use tabs. The first sign of this is inconsistent indentation. Maybe they're just sloppy? Oh, hm, here's some more code where it's wildly inconsistent. Time to play guess-the-tab-width until it settles down. Now should I add a comment at the top to tell Emacs about this setting next time I open the file? Probably not, sigh.

Semantic tabs would be good with consistent culture and tooling behind them.