Nathaniel Braun <nathaniel.braun@gmail.com> writes:

> This is exactly my issue! When a tab is one character, I need it to
> occupy one character, not one character plus a tab.

(I'm going through old bug reports that unfortunately weren't resolved
at the time.)

This problem is still present in Emacs 29.  Here's a text mode buffer
with tabs before Foo and Bar: