And by the way, I just spend the last 3 hours trying to use every setting possible configuration setting offered by Sublime to fix this issue, but there simply is no way to get mixed spaces and (extra long) hard tabs to align properly in Sublime without actually transforming the entire file. If I'm not mistaken, VIM uses 8-chars for a tab stop by default, which is ridiculously large by modern standards. But that default is how some JR developers mistakenly introduce hard tabs that are excessively long into the codebase. Meaning, if they hit tab to add a new source line within an if block, the 8-char hard tab will look like its aligned because it looks the same visually as a soft tab of 4 spaces that has auto-indent enabled. In VIM, I can get both new and old lines to align properly using different hard and soft tab settings, without resorting to full reformatting of the file (to flush all those stinky tabs misalign with all the other soft tab (space) indentation throughout the source files.

From what I can see, I think the reason Sublime has been causing so much pain with users dealing with tabs is that it does not appear to differentiate between soft tabs and hard tabs the way that VIM does. This is a real problem. Its nice that I can first toggle the status bar to set tabs to match the original indentation of some other developer (who apparently thought an 8-char hard tab was a 'good idea'), then convert to spaces, then change back to my preferred 4-char tab with 'Convert Indentation to Space' option. But the problem with that approach is that it has to potential to cause hundreds or thousands of lines of source to be shown as changed during code check in, when I may only want to change just a few actual lines. In VIM, you can distinguish between hard tabs and soft tabs, such that my soft tab setting is 4, but the hard tab setting is left at 8 to match the original developers setting, and yet everything lines up correctly. And any new code I add all has my correct tabs-to-spaces setting using 4 actual spaces. Its really kind of a mess in a situation like this with Sublime. I'm not sure why the authors didn't carefully review how it was being done in VIM to try to achieve the same granularity of settings, so potentially millions of lines of legacy code would not look stupid with mismatched hard and soft tabs mixed all throughout (which is extremely common due to differences among developers preferred settings).