Some background: I used SciTE to edit my makefiles without issues until recently, when I changed the tab settings by adding these lines to cpp.properties:
tabsize=2
indent.size=2
use.tabs=0
And from I remember, everything still worked okay (I was editing both a makefile and a .cpp file).
That was about two weeks ago. Now I literally cannot type a tab character when editing a makefile, which requires a hard tab to work. Every tab character is turned into 4 spaces. (I search for "\t" and " " to determine which is which.) Ironically, if I edit a .cpp file, I get an honest-to-goodness tab character (with a 4-space width) despite the settings above still in place. I have the lines below in my SciTEGlobal.properties, and I even added that to my others.properties and SciTEUser.properties, to no effect.
tabsize=4
indent.size=4
use.tabs=1
Wherenelse should I look? Something else is controlling my settings other than these files. Thanks.
update I've answered the question myself below.