Digging deeper into bug 43587, it seems to be related to move-to-column behaving slightly different when the text in a line has the invisible property set. Here is how to recreate. According to the documentation for move-to-column, I would not expect any difference between the two lines: > Optional second argument FORCE non-nil means if COLUMN is in the middle of a tab character, change it to spaces. For the first line, the tab has not been changed to spaces... Am I overlooking something? Kind Regards, Christoph (progn   (switch-to-buffer "indent-test.txt")   (erase-buffer)   (insert "\tLine starting with INVISIBLE text after TAB\n")   (insert "\tLine starting with visible text after TAB\n")   (insert "\nUsing move-to-column to move 'into' TAB, using the FORCE parameter on both lines\n")   (whitespace-mode 1)   (add-text-properties 2 21 '(invisible t))   (beginning-of-buffer)   (move-to-column 7 t)   (forward-line)   (move-to-column 7 t))