While digging into scoping editor.softTabs in #3718, it's pretty clear that the setting has very little influence on the actual value chosen. It's effectively the worst-case fallback: it only works on an empty file.

I propose doing a couple things:

• adding a new editor.tabType setting that accepts 3 values: Auto, Hard, Soft. With the default being auto. Then in the scoped settings for each language, they can set it to whatever they want.
• Changing TextEditor::setSoftTabs to being a settings override accepting 4 values: unset / use-the-settings, Auto, Hard, Soft
• Reading the settings on each time we need to get the tab type. Something like (pseudo code):

getTabType: (scopeDescriptor) ->
  @userTabTypeOverride or atom.config.get(scopeDescriptor, 'editor.tabType') or atom.config.get(scopeDescriptor, 'editor.softTabs') or 'soft'

See

Refs

• Soft tabs setting is ignored #3584

Comment if you know of more issues, complaints. I know there have been several complaints about this, but cant find issues.