As Nick said, Python is just fine with tabs!And how will this look e.g. to Python, which generally doesn't even like tabs? Variable width tabs will likely cause havoc in Python programs...
His GEdit plugin supports this, but it's a lossy conversion. When reading back the 0x20s, you have to try to figure out what was supposed to be a tab, and I'm sure you might get some false positives eventually, unless there's something I'm missing.Now, if you did the exact same thing, but behind the scenes inserted spaces instead of tab characters, then it would be nice.