Yep, that's exactly what this does (it took some looking around for me to find the function), but whitespace-toggle-options means that the next thing you run will be a local change to the buffer file. You can verify this with both the prelude-c.el and the prelude-go.el file below (the same change is made to both). Verify by opening a makefile, check that it has tabs and that the tabs are not showing up as highlighted (which is what this change should have done). Then open another file and insert tabs and check that they are highlighted (I just opened scratch and replaced a word with `\t` to easily verify the functionality)