@joaomoreno

Our project settings force the insertion of tabs:

.vscode/settings.json

// Place your settings in this file to overwrite default and user settings.
{
    "editor.insertSpaces": false, // <---- THIS IS THE ONE
    "files.trimTrailingWhitespace": true,
...
}

Should this only act on when there is no definite hint about the file's indentation? E.g.: new files.

The settings get applied by the workbench to each editor regardless the model being for an empty file or not. If this setting is left out, then the model is used for guessing. If the guessing code is not confident, it falls back to insertSpaces:false, tabSize:4. The fallback values have no configuration story.

I think our intent here is to say: "all TypeScript, CSS and JS files should use tabs". This sounds to me as a great usecase for .editorconfig

Is there any mode specific configuration instead? YAML actually banned tabs, so our editor putting one in there is just wrong. That is true for our project as it is for every user out there writing YAML.

I've run into this too, I want the behavior of auto but fallback to space, not tab. Not sure if atom does anything special here or just falls back to space by default.

For those wondering, Atom also falls back, but to spaces.
Spaces is a better option because almost all compilers support spaces.

I'm ok with changing the fallback values, I especially like the reasoning that all compilers support spaces.

So the action out of this issue is to change the fallback defaults to insertSpaces: true, tabSize: 4