RE: a beginner's emacs troubles

[Drew Adams]

> My second problem is this: I press tab, emacs inserts a tab character,
> then I press backspace, in hopes that emacs will delete tab character,
> but instead it goes back one-character space, and leaves many spaces
> in place of tab!

See user option `backward-delete-char-untabify-method'.

> I'm really fed up with emacs' understanding of tabs :/

Just a suggestion: It's your understanding of TAB in Emacs that you need to
improve, if you want to be able to use Emacs to your advantage. ;-)

Keep in mind too that TAB behavior is one of those (many) things that people
have very different opinions about, and first opinions about it often change
as someone uses Emacs more. The manual should help, and you can search for
`tab' on Emacs Wiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki?search=tab.