[visual-studio] Visual Studio replace tab with 4 spaces?

Is there a way to set TAB button to work as 4 spaces in Visual Studio 2010 instead of going to Edit->Advanced->Untabify Selected Lines?

This question is related to visual-studio

The answer is


You can edit this behavior in:

Tools->Options->Text Editor->All Languages->Tabs

Change Tab to use "Insert Spaces" instead of "Keep Tabs".

Note you can also specify this per language if you wish to have different behavior in a specific language.


First set in the following path Tools->Options->Text Editor->All Languages->Tabs if still didn't work modify as mentioned below Go to Edit->Advanced->Set Indentation ->Spaces


For Visual Studio 2019 users:

By the comment under accepted answer, link:

Well... This is "almost" still the same in VS 2019... if you already done that and seems not to work, go to: Tools > Options, and then Text Editor > Advanced > Uncheck "Use adaptive formatting" as seen here


For VS2010 and above (VS2010 needs a plugin). If you have checked/set the options of the tab size in Visual Studio but it still won't work. Then check if you have a .editorconfig file in your project! This will override the Visual Studio settings. Edit the tab-size in that file.

This can happen if you install an Angular application in your project with the Angular-Cli.

See MSDN blog


None of these answer were working for me on my macbook pro. So what i had to do was go to:

Preferences -> Source Code -> Code Formatting -> C# source code.

From here I could change my style and spacing tabs etc. This is the only project i have where the lead developer has different formatting than i do. It was a pain in the butt that my IDE would format my code different than theirs.


If you don't see the formatting option, you can do Tools->Import and Export settings to import the missing one.