codysseus@sdf  laments  Emacs  inserting  spaces  in  place  of  TAB
characters [0].

  "I found it  a bit aggravating when Emacs kept  shooting me in the
  foot by  inserting spaces whenever  I hit <TAB> which  would break
  parsing."

To be fair, this  is almost always what you want,  but of course not
when crafting gophermaps. I posted a tip about entering literal TABs
when using Emacs and vi/vim [1], since it is so short, here it is:

  "In  GNU Emacs,  you can  enter a  literal TAB  character in  your
  editing buffer by typing <ctrl>-q  TAB. In vi/vim, while in insert
  mode use <ctrl>-v TAB."

A few more tips  for Emacs, if you really want to  insert a TAB when
you press TAB, you can put the following in your .emacs file:

  (setq-default indent-tabs-mode t)

In an  existing buffer, you  can also convert existing  sequences of
spaces to TABs with:

  M-x tabify

Which will work on the  currently selected region (M-x untabify does
the reverse). If you do this, you may want to update the 'tab-width'
variable as it is set to 8 by default.

[0] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/codysseus/phlogs/2020-07-07-2.txt
[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/slugmax/docs/gopher/howto_tabs_in_vim_emacs.txt