> I /think/ he means what the tab key's effect is when typed in > his editor of choice
Correct. Hitting TAB should indent to the correct level for the current context. I don't especially care whether the editor does by inserting actual TAB characters or a bunch of spaces. I've normally got enough going on in my head when writing code, worrying about the house style should not be one of them. N PS: This is probably my pet peeve about writing FreeBSD code. There's no Emacs style(9) mode (although you can come close), and last time I checked, some of style(9) really can't be implemented automatically. To my mind, that's a bug in the house style...