Vim does handle this. Here is Vim (and I've removed my .vimrc file, so this is not a setting I have set personally), on a Makefile where the third line erroneously uses spaces:
> I just don't see how insisting on tab and not space is remotely defensible.
This is like insisting that people haven't been having religious wars over this sort topic for years. You can see the Wiki[1] page on it (which starts "This is one of the eternal Holy Wars") for arguments as to why someone might prefer tabs. I personally like them because they allow the reader of the code to choose the visual layout of the indentation.
Now, while I love tabs, I work in Python all day. But good editors, like Vim, allow you to customize the indentation settings sufficiently to handle both cases like Python (spaces for indent) and Makefile (tabs) gracefully. So "Indent" and "Dedent" just do The Right Thing™ and it mostly never matters.
If someone is really paranoid about white space issues in a file you’re editing on vim, you can can always use `:set list` to display those characters.
FWIW, the more experienced a programmer is, the more likely they are to prefer spaces over tabs.
My pet theory is that the more experience you have, the more likely you are to have worked with Python, which is a lot easier to work with if you just always s/\t/ / (replace tabs with spaces).
