> I also remember old school bourne shell wanting tabs in some places (case statements?), but bash doesn't have that issue.

From bash(1):

> If the redirection operator is <<-, then the shell strips all leading tab characters from input lines and the line containing delimiter.

That's also how it works with zsh.

This is why my here-doc delimiters are always un-indented despite surrounding indentation.

Wish bash had something like ruby's `<<~`, which accepts either space or tab indentation of the delimiter and additionally removes the indentation of the block (likely based on the least indented line).