In emacs, whenever tab is pressed, the cursor moves to the appropriate location on the current line. However, in vim, this does not happen, the tab is a given length and will go that far every time I press tab. Is there a way to enable "smart tabbing" in vim?
I'm not exactly sure what behavior you expect, but this is probably it.
:set smarttab
Also consider setting:
:set smartindent
:set autoindent