TextMate with 2 or 4 indent level but 8 column \t

Question

If it was up to me I'd ban \t character altogether from source code and just use plain spaces - but a lot of sources, especially in C, are indented like this:

• no indent
• 4 spaces
• \t
• \t + 4 spaces
• \t\t

TextMate has trouble with it - it has a single setting for indentation (normally 2 or 4 depending on language, 8 is rare), and meaning of \t (universally 8 if present at all).

Am I missing some setting to get it work properly?

Answer 1

That's the backwards way in which emacs inserts indentation by default (4 spaces for one level, 1 tab for two, 1 tab + 4 spaces for three, and so on). You could work around it by setting the indent to 8 spaces...but then you'll be inserting 8 spaces always (or a tab always, if you have TM set up that way). As far as I know, there's no way to handle the asinine emacs-style indentation in TextMate.

Answer 2

One way is to replace tabs with spaces while you're editing:

# Replace tabs with 8 spaces in C sources
perl -lape 's/\t/        /g' -i *.c *.h;

# Now edit your files

# Replace 8 spaces with tabs
perl -lape 's/        /\t/g' -i *.c *.h

Not tested, but that's one way to go about things. This will also mess with tabs/spaces that are not at the beginning of the line, but you probably don't have any of those.