Question

I love Emacs but don’t like how it does indentation: either an uncontrollable mix of tabs-and-spaces or just spaces ((setq indent-tabs-mode nil)).

I want Emacs to do do indentation:

1. With tabs alone.

2. Do the indentation to a fixed number of places (not 6 sometimes, 8 other times and 4 in some other places).

3. Be able to set one level of indentation as being equal to 4 (or 2) spaces.

4. If I change the value of the tab stop, all newly-opened or reloaded files should use the new value (or can this change be affected only by re-starting Emacs?)

Is all of the above possible? Some settings in .emacs or a package?

Most IDEs (e.g. Eclipse) offer the above.

Answer 1

smart tabs would insert tabs and spaces contextually.

Personally I only use spaces for both indentation and alignment (at least for my own projects). Here is another article on emacswiki I found very useful about the topic