TeXworks
Feature Request: Make tab insert spaces
It would be nice to be able to make tab insert a user specified number of
spaces instead of a fixed number of pixels. If a user is using a monospaced
font, then this helps a lot with alignment. Also, if we define the tabbing
based on the number of spaces vs a fixed length, then it will adjust
automatically when the user changes their font.
Certainly, we should keep what we have now. But I think this would be a nice
addition.
Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 13 Aug 2010 at 6:37
Original comment by st.loeffler on 14 Aug 2010 at 6:26
- Added labels: Type-Enhancement
- Removed labels: Type-Defect
I stumbled over this post, right now. I was just so intrigued that that Tab key
doesn't insert spaces, but a fixed pixel distance.
Shouldn't the Tab key insert either a Tab character, with a width that I could
set (in spaces), or an actual number of spaces? For instance, I'm used to
inserting either two or four spaces on every Tab key press.
This is actually the only editor I know of, that uses this kind of Tab key.
Original comment by [email protected] on 24 Jun 2012 at 4:35
It does insert a Tab character, only that (as you correctly identified) it
irritatingly renders it as a certain number of pixels instead of characters.
That is just so wrong!
Any sane editor has options as follows:
Tab width: ___ spaces
[ ] Insert tabs as ___ spaces
Original comment by [email protected] on 26 Jun 2012 at 3:00
But what do you do if the user does not use a fixed-width font?
FWIW, Qt only supports setting the tab width in pixel
(http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qtextedit.html#tabStopWidth-prop). We could
work around this by dynamically calculating the pixel size of a representative
character, though...
Original comment by st.loeffler on 1 Jul 2012 at 4:19
I was searching for this issue and ended up finding this feature request.
I think what everybody here (and I'll add myself to the list) is asking for is
to give the option for the tab key to insert x number of spaces, instead of
inserting a tab character.
Based on the Qt link that you posted, it seems like you might have understood
that the request was to render the tab character as x number of spaces - but
I'm not sure that this is what the original poster was referring to. Gedit has
the feature in question, it's called "insert spaces instead of tabs". It seems
like Kate (which is Qt-based) also does it:
http://www.kate-editor.org/doc/config-dialog-editor.html
Based on that, does it sound doable?
Original comment by [email protected] on 20 Jan 2015 at 9:13
I always use spaces instead of tabs to make formatting consistent across different environments, and so this feature would be a welcome addition for me. Currently, I have to write the spaces by hand which is quite a pain.
