Beyond that, it is silent
whether a program must use spaces or tab characters, as long as it is
consistent. findutils is consistent in that \t is always treated as 8
columns, in part inspired by the GNU emacs c-code-mode, as well as GNU
indent, which both clean up whitespace (on save, 8 consecutive leading spaces
are turned into a tab) in this manner to reduce the size of files. If your
editor cannot properly be configured to treat tab characters as eight
columns, then I would argue it is a bug in your editor, and not in
findutils.