Previous: Tab Stops, Up: Indentation
Emacs normally uses both tabs and spaces to indent lines. If you
prefer, all indentation can be made from spaces only. To request
this, set indent-tabs-mode
to nil
. This is a per-buffer
variable, so altering the variable affects only the current buffer,
but there is a default value which you can change as well.
See Locals.
There are also commands to convert tabs to spaces or vice versa, always preserving the columns of all nonblank text. M-x tabify scans the region for sequences of spaces, and converts sequences of at least three spaces to tabs if that can be done without changing indentation. M-x untabify changes all tabs in the region to appropriate numbers of spaces.