I can't find this: How do I use 4 SPACES instead of a TAB in EMACS?

Question

I am making the jump to EMACS, and I can\'t find what I need to do in my .emacs file to get php-mode AND all other modes to insert 4 spaces instead of

Answer 1

The default behavior of TAB in Emacs (in programming modes) is to automatically indent to the right place, where this place is decided based on indentation rules described by the major mode (it's one of the most important job of a major-mode, actually, much more demanding in general than color-highlighting). Of course if the line is already indented to the right place, hitting TAB won't do anything.

So you can force TAB to behave in a dumb way, like you're asking, but then you'd miss out on most of the fun. E.g. you could do something like

(global-set-key "\t"
  (lambda ()
    (interactive)
    (let ((prevline-indent (save-excursion (forward-line -1) (current-indentation))))
      (if (< (current-column) prevline-indent))
          (indent-to prevline-indent)
        (insert "    ")))))

But instead, I recommend you use TAB the way Emacs intended and explain to Emacs how you like your code to be indented. Probably by setting something like:

(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) ;; Prefer SPC over TAB when indenting.
(setq c-basic-offset 4)             ;; I like indenting by 4 spaces.

From what you say, the TAB indentation in your php-mode doesn't work right, so there might simply be a bug in your php-mode. Tell us exactly in which case it is not working right, showing the text that gets mis-indented, and explaining in which way the indentation does not match your expectations.