Comment by worik

I can, in vim it's simple. It just bothers me that it is the default and I have to take care of tabs with the rainbow, or a toggle shortcut like:

function TabCollapse_Toggle() abort

    if &tabstop ==1

        set tabstop=8

    else

        set tabstop=1

    endif

 endfunction

BTW if you hate tabs looking like other characters and other invisible characters (like spaces at the end of line, non breaking spaces...), I have a solution in CuteVim (https://github.com/csdvrx/CuteVim : just run the portable executable) where I mapped it by default to a Fxx key

If you already use vim, here's the relevant part: assuming your Shift-F11 is free, add to your vimrc:

" Default is off, `se list` to turn on and `se nolist` to turn off

" Traditional with ISO-8859-1:

"set listchars=tab:»·space:_,trail:·,eol:¶

" Or cuter with unicodes:

set listchars=tab:↹⇥,space:_,nbsp:␣,trail:•,extends:⟩,precedes:⟨,eol:↲

set showbreak=↪

inoremap <silent> <S-F11> <Esc>:set list!<CR>

noremap <silent> <S-F11> :set list!<CR>

Shift-F11 will then become a toggle, to show you tabs: you will see ↹ where the tab starts, and ⇥ for how long it is

>Can you not adjust your tab stops?

I've used this in vim for years:

:se expandtab tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4

(those can be abbreviated, check docs)

Then:

I use only tabs for indentation.

All the tabs get expanded to four spaces each.

Indenting and unindenting lines or blocks of lines, moves them by four spaces.

Never had a problem.

Maybe there are more fancy ways, but this works fine for me.