My IDE seems to think this, it just hates tabs – that is: the tabulator character to indent your code and your text files. Whenever it is restarted, my tabulator settings are reverted from proper tabs to 4 spaces:

Now, as a seasoned pragmatic programmer, I know to refrain from any tedious tabs-vs-spaces debate*. How about you refrain from messing up my formatting settings, IntelliJ? These issues have been around for ages – and yes, I do update my IDE from time to time, and no, I will not resort to editing some hidden configuration options by hand.

*) Because there is no debate. :) Observe the process of adding and removing a tab the correct way, and when poorly emulating tabs with spaces:

When editing code files outside of the IDE (in vim, nano, or in CygnusEd on the Amiga), this becomes even worse. To keep a consistent code format, you now have to type in 4 to 8 spaces like a monkey if you merely want to add a tab.