I'd like to be able to set my "indentation level" to 4 and leave the tab stops at 8. That is, if I hit my tab key the cursor should move as if my tabs stops are set at 4 (any any spaces required should be added). If there are any actual tab characters in the file, the file should display as if I had selected 8 as my tab size. (Basically this is because I edit files that other people have edited using emacs which "intelligently" uses tabs where it can to fill in sequences of 8 spaces.)
I was playing with the notion of expanding all the tabs to spaces so that it will display properly even if I have my tab size set to 4, but I'm afraid this will cause lots of extraneous differences when I check in my changes to CVS.
Another item is that when I'm working in Tcl I want my indentation level to be 4 characters. When working in PL/SQL I want it at 8. (Probably in C or C++ I'd want 2 or 3.)