Actually gnome-terminal display tabs as 8 spaces, and this is very annoying when you cat files or view diffs, is there some way to change this permanently?
The unique solution I found is to type in terminal:
tabs 5,9,13,17,21,25,29,33,37,41
and append it to ~/.bashrc if you want permanent changes.
PS: This obviously cover up to 10 tab indents.