> with tabs you can configure your editor to your preferences.
Configure 1 tab to be 4 spaces.
Sometimes it's easier to go with the flow. I like tabs for the reasons you mentioned, but fixed-width spaces are a bit better for some reasons too.
IDE's can do the heavy lifting of re-formatting indentation levels and converting tabs to spaces for me, and it means if I cat a file on a remote server regardless of the bash tab width settings or if I'm in your code or the stdlib it will all make sense.
> with tabs you can configure your editor to your preferences
Except that you can't because people using tabs will invariably start mixing tabs and spaces because they can't separate indentation from layout. So the code will be messed up unless you configure your editor to someone else's preferences. Also, I'm sure there is some obscure git setting to de-uglify tab users' diffs, but I'd rather not find out.
The PEP8 myth is quite funny. Almost all people I've met who were repeating "follow the pep8" like a mantra, have never read it. The main idea behind pep8 is: be consistent... however even the python library is not consistent. And it looks like no one cares. There was a great moment to make it nice and consistent - creating the python3, where many incompatible changes were introduced. Instead, the mess is like it was, and people repeat the mantra "follow pep8".
Before you say that I'm crazy... please, go and read pep8.
But tabs vs. spaces is indeed a bad analogy, because of course it's 4 spaces. ;-P
pycodestyle, the Python style checker, has a few checks disabled by default (because there's no consensus they're good ideas), and even some mutually exclusive ones:
These religious wars can largely be swept away with one simple, practical question: What is going to result in less noise in pull requests and the commit history, given that nowadays everyone uses a different editor with different configuration defaults, and is going to result in less time in pull requests squabbling over these kinds of formatting issues, given that nowadays everyone uses a different editor with different configuration defaults?
Tabs vs. Spaces has a fairly good answer that flows out of this way of looking at things. There is a counter-argument to that answer, but it is invalidated if you move toward conventions for argument lists and chained method calls that are also designed to limit noise in the source control system.
IMO, the argument about bracing also has a practical, non-religious answer once you start looking at your coding conventions this way.
