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

[Charilaos Skiadas]

On Jan 31, 2007, at 9:51 AM, Rob McBroom wrote:
>
> Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can  
> have TextMate do this for you just by altering settings.
>
Correct, it will not.

> You could probably create a command that goes through your document  
> and replaces 8 spaces with a tab character. To get even fancier,  
> you could probably create a command that does this and saves the  
> document and bind this command to ⌘S, so when you save the file,  
> it gets formatted the way you want.

That is definitely possible. Perhaps there are already some solutions  
in the list archives, this kind of thing has come up before.

> I'm not sure if TextMate will let you use Tab as a key equivalent  
> for a command, but if so, you could make it even more automated  
> (probably what you want) by having it do a search/replace on the  
> current line every time you hit the Tab key. This might screw up  
> the cursor position though.

Tab is the key associated to tab triggers. So you could use it as a  
key equivalent, but that would disable all key triggers.

Actually what would probably work is setting tab as a "tab trigger".  
Then the command will only be triggered if it is preceded by a tab  
(and will swallow that tab).

Haris