How many spaces for tab character(\t)?

Question

I want to implement a text drawing function. But I am not sure how \\t works, which means I don\'t know how many spaces I should print for \\t.

Answer 1

A Tab character shifts over to the next tab stop. By default, there is one every 8 spaces. But in most shells you can easily edit it to be whatever number of spaces you want (profile preferences in linux, set tabstop in vim).