Unfortunately, there are reasons why this is not suitable (for my situation, at least).

1. Try getting a team of 8 programmers to use tabs instead of spaces, everywhere, in a team where it is hard enough to get all of them to document their changes.
2. The editor that we use (Progress AppBuilder – or "CrapBuilder" as it is sometimes known) is quirky, and so every tab key press is interpretted as pressing the space key 4 times. Therefore inserting tabs is futile, they just get converted to spaces.
3. AppBuilder has "aliases" (i.e. expansions – if I type "dvch<space>", it expands to:

   DEFINE VARIABLE <cursor position set to here> AS CHARACTER NO-UNDO.

   which inserts several of the most common instances where I would like this to happen. Again, this uses spaces not tabs.

4. People change tab spaces – so it wouldn’t always work.

The idea of tabs is that tabstops set the positioning of common elements. This allows you to do columnar alignment without fiddling with spaces. You can insert or delete characters up to one tab wide without penalty (then overflow bites you).

It’s even better in something like Word, where tabs really do exist (the ruler at the top) rather than being characters.

Or, look into a mini-language like FORMAT (in Common Lisp), which lets you align your data column-wise on output…