Set 4 Space Indent in Emacs in Text Mode

Question

I\'ve been unsuccessful in getting Emacs to switch from 8 space tabs to 4 space tabs when pressing the TAB in buffers with the major mode text-mode.

Answer 1

Update: Since Emacs 24.4:

tab-stop-list is now implicitly extended to infinity. Its default value is changed to nil which means a tab stop every tab-width columns.

which means that there's no longer any need to be setting tab-stop-list in the way shown below, as you can keep it set to nil.

Original answer follows...

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It always pains me slightly seeing things like (setq tab-stop-list 4 8 12 ................) when the number-sequence function is sitting there waiting to be used.

(setq tab-stop-list (number-sequence 4 200 4))

or

(defun my-generate-tab-stops (&optional width max)
  "Return a sequence suitable for `tab-stop-list'."
  (let* ((max-column (or max 200))
         (tab-width (or width tab-width))
         (count (/ max-column tab-width)))
    (number-sequence tab-width (* tab-width count) tab-width)))

(setq tab-width 4)
(setq tab-stop-list (my-generate-tab-stops))