[comex]

Can whitespace-cleanup really differentiate between places where you want a tab for indentation, and places where you want spaces for alignment, where the number of spaces may be greater than the tab width? After all, the only way to differentiate is to guess what you might be trying to align to by looking at surrounding lines… but from a quick search, whitespace.el looks less complex than that.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You're entirely correct. Sorry, i forget, whitespace-cleanup is there so that I can remove dangling whitespace from the end of lines.

supertab mode is the tab-to-indent/space-to-align magic.