What's interesting is that I never used to care how code was indented, never bothered me. However, I got a job using Python/Django, and almost all of the code in that community is in the PEP8 style (4 space indents, etc, http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/).

Now whenever I read python code that is outside of PEP8 just a little bit, it makes me cringe, but I can still read other, non python code indented almost any way. Thought that was interesting.

Why don't IDE's just do the conversion on the fly on a per-user basis?

Sure you'd need to know the standard occasionally but can't the code just load with my "stylesheet" and then use tabs. Then when it's saved the code is simply reverted to space delimits. This sort of formatting issue should not be an issue anymore surely?

To be fair, this is partly because python is uniquely sensitive to whitespace issues. Other languages don't tend to care as much. C code that's mixed between 2, 4, and 8 space indentation might be untidy, but it's really not that big a deal to read it as long as the code isn't broken in other ways.

This is especially true when multiple developers have been editing the same file. Some developers will use tabs some spaces. The end result is code that is completely unreadable and that must be manually re-indented. The developer that uses tabs that is editing a hard space indented file, might not even realize what evil they are introducing to a file. Then the next developer opens the file and screams.

Inconsistency is not even that important as long as the code can be run through a prettifier. I'd rather not waste time caring about any of this.