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! :-)