STYLE: Add more on horizontal whitespace issues.

diff --git a/STYLE b/STYLE
index 96eb0f2..a6a4f5c 100644 (file)
--- a/STYLE
+++ b/STYLE
@@ -98,6 +98,20 @@ enough to fit in my narrow columns, so the right hand side of a wide
 window would be mostly blank.  This seems wasteful to me, when I could
 fill that space with more code.
 
+Horizontal whitespace for layout purposes -- i.e., indentation and
+alignment, rather than just separating words -- consists of as many tabs
+as possible, followed by as many spaces as necessary to reach the target
+column.  Tab stops occur at every eight columns.  You can tell this
+because when you cat a file to your terminal, that's how the tabs
+appear.  Editors which disagree about this are simply wrong.
+
+My indentation quantum is usually two columns.  It seems that some
+modern editors are deeply confused, and think that tab width and
+indentation quantum are the same thing, but they aren't.  Such broken
+editors will make a hopeless mess of my code.  If you have the
+misfortune to use such an editor, maybe you could contribute patches to
+fix it.
+
 Lisp code does have a tendency to march across to the right quite
 rapidly given a chance.  I have a number of strategies for dealing with
 this.