How to make the tab character 4 spaces instead of 8 spaces in nano

Question

When I press TAB in nano editor  the cursor will jump with 8 spaces like this   def square x           return x   x def cube y           return y   y   y   how can I set the tab stop width to 4 spaces to display like this   def square x       return x   x def cube y       return y   y   y

User · Answer

For anyone who may stumble across this old question ...

There is one thing that I think needs to be addressed.

~/.nanorc is used to apply your user specific settings to nano, so if you are editing files that require the use of sudo nano for permissions then this is not going to work.

When using sudo your custom user configuration files will not be loaded when opening a program, as you are not running the program from your account so none of your configuration changes in ~/.nanorc will be applied.

If this is the situation you find yourself in (wanting to run sudo nano and use your own config settings) then you have three options :

using command line flags when running sudo nano
editing the /root/.nanorc file
editing the /etc/nanorc global config file

Keep in mind that /etc/nanorc is a global configuration file and as such it affects all users, which may or may not be a problem depending on whether you have a multi-user system.

Also, user config files will override the global one, so if you were to edit /etc/nanorc and ~/.nanorc with different settings, when you run nano it will load the settings from ~/.nanorc but if you run sudo nano then it will load the settings from /etc/nanorc.

Same goes for /root/.nanorc this will override /etc/nanorc when running sudo nano

Using flags is probably the best option unless you have a lot of options.

User · Answer

If you use nano with a language like python  as in your example  it s also a good idea to convert tabs to spaces   Edit your    nanorc file  or create it  and add   set tabsize 4 set tabstospaces   If you already got a file with tabs and want to convert them to spaces i recommend the expandcommand  shell    expand -4 input py  gt  output py

User · Answer

Setting the tab size in nano  cd  etc ls -a sudo nano nanorc     Link  https   app gitbook com  cai-dat-chrome-ubuntu-18-04 s chuaphanloai setting-the-tab-size-in-nano

User · Answer

Command-line flag  From man nano   -T cols  --tabsize cols      Set the size  width  of a tab to cols columns      The value of cols must be greater than 0  The default value is 8  -E  --tabstospaces      Convert typed tabs to spaces    For example  to set the tab size to 4  replace tabs with spaces  and edit the file  foo txt   you would run the command   nano -ET4 foo txt   Config file  From man nanorc   set tabsize n     Use a tab size of n columns  The value of n must be greater than 0      The default value is 8  set unset tabstospaces     Convert typed tabs to spaces    Edit your    nanorc file  create it if it does not exist   and add those commands to it  For example   set tabsize 4 set tabstospaces   Nano will use these settings by default whenever it is launched  but command-line flags will override them

User · Answer

In nano 2 2 6 the line in    nanorc to do this seems to be  set tabsize 4  Setting tabspace gave me the error   Unknown flag  tabspace

User · Answer

For future viewers  there is a line in my  etc nanorc file close to line 153 that says  set tabsize 8   The word might need to be tabsize instead of tabspace  After I replaced 8 with 4 and uncommented the line  it solved my problem

[tabs] How to make the tab character 4 spaces instead of 8 spaces in nano?

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