What do you guys think of this: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
"The problem is that we're using tabs and spaces to format text for aesthetic reasons rather than treating them semantically - tabs are for indenting and aligning text, spaces are for separating keywords."
There's also a demo applet and a screencast: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/#tryitrightnow http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/#gedit
I assume it would not be trivial to integrate this into Geany?