bug#4743: fundamental mode not sufficiently fundamental yet

[Stefan Monnier]

> Actually I just want to enter some text without having to care about
> different modes or redefining some internal functions.

Looks like maybe you don't want Emacs.

> then the cursor should move to the next tab stop, which should be
> every 8th column, as usual.

That's not what the TAB key does usually in Emacs.

> All the Emacs clones I tried (mg, zile, jove) work this way.

It turns out that Emacs's fundamental mode used to behave in this way at
some point in the past.  But most like those "micro emacsen" do it this
way simply because they want to keep things simple.

> But maybe I am too blind to see. Is there a more basic mode for Emacs
> than "fundamental"?

I told you there's paragraph-indent-text-mode which may fit your bill.
Otherwise (setq-default indent-fill-function 'indent-to-left-margin) is
another way to get what you want (by reverting to the older behavior,
which is also probably the one still used in XEmacs).


        Stefan