title: Emacs global configuration of tabs
body: <p>I'm attempting to switch from Vim to Emacs, but I'm tearing my hair out trying to configure it to treat tabs how I wish.  I require:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Inserted "tabs" to be expanded into <strong>two</strong> spaces.  Emacs stubbornly sticks to eight, no matter what I do.</li>
  <li>Tabs (i.e. real <code>\t</code> characters) to be represented on screen by <strong>two</strong> spaces.</li>
  <li>Pressing TAB should <strong>insert a tab at the cursor</strong> rather than <strong>indent the entire line</strong>.  Currently, I press TAB anywhere and Emacs destroys all whitespace at the start of the line; this is the most infuriating thing so far.</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>My current <code>~/.emacs</code> reads</p>
  
  <pre><code>(setq standard-indent 2)
  (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but I have tried no end of suggested configurations from the web, none of which have done what they said they would.  (Does the API constantly change?  I'm using <code>GNU Emacs 23.1.1</code>, apparently.)</p>