How to change indentation mode in Atom

Question

I haven t been able to figure this out yet  Atom seems to use spaces as the default indentation mode  I prefer to have tabs instead though  Sublime Text has built in functionality for switching and converting indentation   Anyone found out how to change the indentation mode of Atom   Some screenshots from Sublime Text

User · Answer

When Atom auto-indent-detection got it hopelessly wrong and refused to let me type a literal Tab character, I eventually found the 'Force-Tab' extension - which gave me back control. I wanted to keep shift-tab for outdenting, so set ctrl-tab to insert a hard tab. In my keymap I added:

'atom-text-editor': 'ctrl-tab': 'force-tab:insert-actual-tab'

User · Answer

OS X    Go to Atom - gt  prefrences or CMD     Scroll down and select  Tab Length  that you prefer

User · Answer

This is built into core  See Settings   Tab Type and choose auto   When set to  quot auto quot   the editor auto-detects the tab type based on the contents of the buffer  it uses the first leading whitespace on a non-comment line   or uses the value of the Soft Tabs config setting if auto-detection fails   You may also want to take a look at the Auto Detect Indentation package  From the docs   Automatically detect indentation of opened files  It looks at each opened file and sets file specific tab settings  hard soft tabs  tab length  based on the content of the file instead of always using the editor defaults  You might have atom configured to use 4 spaces for tabs but open a rails project which defaults to 2 spaces  Without this package  you would have to change your tabstop settings globally or risk having inconsistent lead spacing in your files

User · Answer

If you re using Babel you may also want to make sure to update your  Language Babel  package   For me  even though I had the Tab Length set to 2 in my core editor settings  the Same setting in the Language Babel config was overriding it with 4    Atom - gt  Preferences - gt  Packages - gt   Search for Babel  - gt  Grammar - gt  Tab Length  Make sure the appropriate Grammar  There s  Babel ES6 Javascript Grammar    language-babel-extension Grammar  as well as  Regular Expression    You probably want to update all of them to be consistent

User · Answer

Adding  Manbroski answer here that worked for me   try Ctrl-Shift-P Editor  Toggle Soft Tabs

User · Answer

If you are using the version 1 21 1     Click on Packages   Settings View   Open Select  Editor  on the left side panel Scrool down until you see  Tab Length  Edit the value  I like to set it to 4    Now  just close the active tab pane and you are done

User · Answer

If global tab spaces indentation settings no longer fit your needs  I E  you find yourself working with legacy codebases with varied indentation formats  and you need to quickly switch between them  and the auto-detect isn t working  you might try the tab-control plugin  which sort of duplicates the functionality of the menu in your screenshot

User · Answer

I just had the same problem  and none of the suggestions above worked  Finally I tried unchecking  Atomic soft tabs  in the Editor Settings menu  which worked

User · Answer

Go to File -  Settings  There are 3 different options here    Soft Tabs Tab Length Tab Type   I did some testing and have come to these conclusions about what each one does   Soft Tabs - Enabling this means it will use spaces by default  i e  for new files    Tab Length - How wide the tab character displays  or how many spaces are inserted for a tab if soft tabs is enabled   Tab Type - This determines the indentation mode to use for existing files  If you set it to auto it will use the existing indentation  tabs or spaces   If you set it to soft or hard  it will force spaces or tabs regardless of the existing indentation  Best to leave this on auto   Note  Soft   spaces  hard   tab

User · Answer

See Soft Tabs and Tab Length under Settings   Editor Settings   To toggle indentation modes quickly you can use Ctrl-Shift-P and search for Editor  Toggle Soft Tabs

User · Answer

Add this to your    atom config cson  editor      tabLength  4

User · Answer

Changing language-specific configuration  I changed the default tab settings  and it still did not impact when I was editing my files  which were Python files  It also did not change when I modified the     setting in    atom config cson   I don t have a good explanation for either of those   However  when I added the following to my config cson  I was able to change the tab in my Python files to 2 spaces     source python     editor      tabLength  2   Thanks to this resource for the solution  Tab key not respecting tab length

User · Answer

You could try going to  Atom   Preferences   Editor  and set Tab length to 4     This is for mac  For windows you will have to find the appropriate menu

User · Answer

Tab Control gives nice control in a similar manner to that described in your question   Also nice  for JavaScript developers  is ESLint Tab Length for using ESLint config   Or if you re using an  editorconfig for defining project-specific indentation rules  there is EditorConfig

User · Answer

All of the most popular answers on here are all great answers and will turn on spaces for tabs  but they are all missing one thing  How to apply the spaces instead of tabs to existing code    To do this simply select all the code you want to format  then go to Edit- Lines- Auto Indent and it will fix everything selected   Alternatively  you can just select all the code you want to format  then use Ctrl Shift P and search for Auto Indent  Just click it in the search results and it will fix everything selected

User · Answer

Late to the party  but a clean way to do this on a per-project basis  is to add a  editorconfig file to the root of the project  Saves you from having to change Atom s settings when you re working on several projects simultaneously    This is a sample of a very basic setup I m currently using  Works for Atom  ST  etc     http   editorconfig org     Automatically add new line to end of all files on save      insert final newline   true    2 space indentation for SASS CSS     scss sass css   indent style   space indent size   2    Set all JS to tab   gt  space 2  js    js  indent style   space indent size   2

[indentation] How to change indentation mode in Atom?

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