Sure it will work. Even before I discovered this method (which is simple), I was using four spaces typed manually, for indentation in Python, for years.
Maybe it is you who "will not work".
Did you try it before commenting? I already said it works fine.
I've used this in vim for years:
:se expandtab tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4
(those can be abbreviated, check docs)
Then:
I use only tabs for indentation.
All the tabs get expanded to four spaces each.
Indenting and unindenting lines or blocks of lines, moves them by four spaces.
Never had a problem.
Maybe there are more fancy ways, but this works fine for me.