Setting up Emacs tabs like my Vim config

[Some Developer]

I'm playing around with Emacs for the first time at the moment and so 
far things seem to be working well. The only problem I have with Emacs 
is how it deals with tabs and indentation in general.

I've read the manual on it but it seems like Emacs makes this 
unnecessarily hard. Here is my current Vim config:

" Set proper tab / spacing settings
set expandtab
set smarttab
set shiftwidth=4
set tabstop=4
set softtabstop=4

Does anyone know what an equivalent configuration would be in Emacs? I'm 
using 24.3.1 if that makes any difference.