[TxMt] Newbee Q: Hard tabs vs. soft tabs

[Garance A Drosehn]

Hi.

I'm new to textmate (although I did at least buy a license for it),
and have one of those questions that probably comes up a lot.  In my
defense, I did first skim through the beta-book from Pragmatic
Programmers on "Power Editting" with TextMate, and I did try a number
of searches on both the wiki and some of the mailing lists archives.
I haven't found any mention of what I wanted to find, but maybe I just
wasn't picking the right search terms.  So, apologies if this is one
of those hot-button topics which people are tired of hearing of...

In any case, what I want to have is a combination of hard tabs and
soft tabs, and I can't see how to get what I want out of TextMate.
What I want is my tab-intent to be a soft-tab (using blanks) at 4
spaces, but I also want hard-tabs (using the actual tab character) to
be used for 8 spaces.  So, if I tab once I want four spaces, if I tab
twice then I want a single tab character, and with three tabs I want a
tab-character followed by four spaces.  I can get this behavior out of
XCode, and it would be very very useful to me if I could get the same
behavior out of TextMate.

In XCode, I get this behavior via the "Indentation" preferences, by
turning on "Tab key inserts tab, not spaces", and setting tab width=8
and indent width=4.  Apologies if I'm missing some obvious setting in
TextMate.

Thanks for any suggestions.  Other than this one oddity, TextMate
looks like it could be very useful and productive for me -- once I can
master all that it can do!  :-)

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =             drosihn at gmail.com
Senior Systems Programmer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA