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

Add this to your .emacs file:

This will set the width that a tab is displayed to 2 characters (change the number 2 to whatever you want)

(setq default-tab-width 2)

To make sure that emacs is actually using tabs instead of spaces:

(global-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command)

As an aside, the default for emacs when backspacing over a tab is to convert it to spaces and then delete a space. This can be annoying. If you want it to just delete the tab, you can do this:

(setq c-backspace-function 'backward-delete-char)

Enjoy!