TAB should indent at start of line and advance to tab stop otherwise

Question

More precisely, I would like TAB to indent the current line when there are 0 or more whitespace characters between the start of line and the point and to advance to the next tab stop otherwise. I used to have this behavior 1 or 2 major versions ago, but I lost it in an upgrade (I'm currently using 27.2).

I tried customizing tab-always-indent to nil as defined in indent.el, but I think the programming mode is overriding this behavior (I primarily deal in curly-brace languages).

I use this behavior to create "columns" in my source. i.e.

private int       able;
private boolean   baker;

public    int       getAble()                    { return able; }
public    boolean   getBaker()                   { return baker; }

Turns out I needed to pay closer attention to the description when customizing tab-always-indent and customize c-tab-always-indent as:

Some programming language modes have their own variable to control this, e.g., 'c-tab-always-indent', and do not respect this variable.

Answer 1

A more careful reading of the customize description for tab-always-indent points to c-tab-always-indent as controlling this behavior for the c programing family (c, c++, java, probably c#).

Controls the operation of the TAB key. If t, hitting TAB always just indents the current line. If nil, hitting TAB indents the current line if point is at the left margin or in the line’s indentation, otherwise it inserts a "real" TAB character. If ‘complete’, TAB first tries to indent the current line, and if the line was already indented, then try to complete the thing at point.

Some programming language modes have their own variable to control this, e.g., ‘c-tab-always-indent’, and do not respect this variable.