codlink:
Wrong. I'm not moaning. I am making helpful suggestions.
You did in your original post and you have been branded as such. Now you are giving suggestions to make it better which you should have done in your original post.
When I started with Arduino, I didn't know much about programming. The Arduino IDE is a must for beginners to get into learning as it doesn't overwhelm the person. As they get some experience and have read several tutorials, they find more ways to make programming easier by the options that their IDE introduces. As for me, I learned enough to grow out of the Arduino IDE and into eried's IDE. Since then, I have enough knowledge to incorporate Notepad++ as my editor (I do have experience with NPP as I work on websites with it).
Back to you suggestions, the "tab of 8" would be a useful addition to eried's IDE as it organizes the code better. I honestly didn't know that the tab spaces were 8 until you mentioned it..
But for your last suggestion of using make files, I think that would just over complicate an IDE that is meant to be simple for beginners.
No, not at all, the IDE can hide the Makefile details, just like NetBeans and eclipse does.
Once a person becomes more advanced, they can then take advantage of what it has to offer, without a headache and transparently.