GNU Emacs: making the obvious difficult

Off and on it's really irritated me that someone on the GNU team decided to change the default behavior of tab in fundamental mode from insert ^i to indent-relative. I hate indent-relative. It makes lining things up in columns in text files difficult. So every few months I do a Google search, find other people making the same complaint, and see less than helpful suggestions. Tonight I got more frustrated than usual, and so spent more time than usual. It appears that the following shuts off indent-relative for the most part without messing up filename completion or indentation in various modes, e.g., java or html.

(setq default-major-mode 'text-mode)
(define-key text-mode-map "\t" "\C-q\C-i")

The above is pretty much alpha code at the moment. There's detritus in my .emacs that suggests that years ago I didn't like text mode for pnews or mail modes, but those are no longer issues. indent-relative is, IMHO, evidence of word processor-oriented thought processes, not text editor-oriented processes. As Linux grows to be more Windows like (e.g., bloated and buggy), there seems to be an undercurrent of making basic tools, e.g., emacs and wc, less Unix-like.

Emacs Incremental Search Highlighting

Sometime in the fairly recent past default emacs incremental search behavior was modified to underline every occurrence of the search string in the current view. This makes searching very difficult to use if one wants to just skip ahead, e.g., a few 'o' characters, because every 'o' is highlighted, with no way to know which one is at the cursor. To return to the original, more usable behavior add this to your .emacs file: (setq isearch-lazy-highlight nil) ⟨editorial⟩ Emacs more and more is acting less and less like a text editor, and trying to get cute about things. Default behavior keeps changing, and often for the worse. This incremental search highlighting is a good example. Another is that in text mode it's now hard to line things up consistently because tab is no longer tab. Instead tab inserts enough spaces or tabs to line the cursor up with the beginning of the previous line, or with the beginning of a word in the previous line. I'd rather tab be tab. ⟨lairotide⟩