[Uristqwerty]

If I were an emacs user, I'd figure out how to write a plugin to display tab-indented code to my preferences.

No, I used to be a notepad user (on personal projects, not shared work) (you can kinda see it in the use of indentation to help convey information that IDEs would use font or colour to emphasize), and these days use tabs but longingly wish Eclipse, etc. had more options in their already-massive formatting configuration dialogues.

[takeda]

The reason I asked is that I believe this behavior is what Emacs does by default (actually don't know if by default, but saw this from code produced by Emacs users) e.g.

<tab>(inserts 4 spaces)<tab>(replaces 4 spaces into a tab that is 8 columns)<tab>(adds 4 spaces after the tab)<tab>(replaces with two tabs and so on)

Unless I misunderstood what formatting you were using.