does anyone know how to setup emacs so that the tab key do indentation
as usual but never insert any space?

recently i discovered Microsoft Visual Studio takes that approach.
Also, Google Go language has a mechanical means to force all
indentation to be tabs.

 Xah

Add this line in your ~/.emacs:
(setq-default indent-tabs-mode t)

On Feb 27, 2:21 am, hjuvi <hjuvi-goo...@yahoo.fr> wrote:

that gives you mixed tabs and spaces.

I use http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs.  It may insert spaces, but never to indent code, only to align continued lines.

You may need to set tab-width to the basic indentation step that you require. Default is 8.

On Feb 26, 9:35 pm, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Feb 28, 11:09 am, stan <smo...@exis.net> wrote:

i want all tabs for indentation. No space at all.

 Xah

Hello, Xah.

In gnu.emacs.help Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:

In elisp, no chance, unless you set tab-width to 1.  ;-)

In C-like languages, set tab-width and c-basic-offset to be the same, and
set entries in c-offsets-alist to indent only in multiples of
c-basic-offset.

In other language modes it is surely possible and easy.

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

hi Alan!

thanks coming to the rescue. Of all the people, am thinking you are
the top expert i know of on this.

«does anyone know how to setup emacs so that the tab key do
indentation as usual but never insert any space?»

« In elisp, no chance, unless you set tab-width to 1.  ;-)»

aww. Sad.

«In C-like languages, set tab-width and c-basic-offset to be the same,
and set entries in c-offsets-alist to indent only in multiples of c-
basic-offset.»

Cool. I'll try to see if i can get that to work in perl and python
mode. Not a need, but been wanting to experiment on this for long.

really wanted for elisp mode but too bad.

Btw, is there one place that document/tutorial in detail perhaps with
clarity on all the indentation related settings for c-mode? e.g. if i
want X style, do this and that, if i want Y style, do that and this.

 Xah

Actually, you might be able to get some major gross hack working in 99%
of the programming language modes by advising indent-to along the lines
of:

(defadvice indent-to (after sm-only-use-tabs activate)
  (when (eq ?\s (char-before))
    (delete-char (- (skip-chars-backward " ")))
    (insert "\t")))

Of course, one major hurdle will be to make this advice actually active,
because indent-to has its own byte-code (yup, as if this was
a performance-sensitive operation), so all uses of indent-to from .elc
files will happily ignore the advice.

        Stefan

Are you actually concerned with how emacs does indent or the final
stored results? What I mean is would an external filter work? You're
only concerned about the leading tabs (indentation) and not all tabs
anywhere in a line right?

In comp.emacs Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey, thanks!

It's all in the CC Mode manual.  ;-)  In the chapter "Customizing
Indentation".

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

Not really; it's not *impossible*, but it requires agreeing on the
display width of a tab. In my experience, that's a major task even in
all-vi shops. It's a little harder in emacs because so many emacs
programmers have swung away from even trying to agree on tab widths;
but it's a political battle more than a technical one, and I'd rather
not waste my time on political battles in how to save source code.

Well, that depends on what you want the indentation to actually
look like. My own indentation for elisp is (admittedly) a little
idiosyncratic, but even I can't imagine finding elisp readable
with indentations that were limited to multiples of something
larger than 1.  I'd probably need to see a specific example to
understand the underlying principles.

Don't use styles for C-related modes. They are useful for imitating
someone else's style, not for creating your own.  Once you have
indentation doing what you want, you can define a *new* style with the
settings you want.

--
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer
         http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/