I have a file in Visual Studio Code in which I use only tabs for indentation. When I copy the contents of that file somewhere else and edit them, then when I paste them back all tabs are gone and spaces have taken their places.
How can I prevent the use of spaces for indentation and automatically spaces will be converted to tabs?
Also I have changed the preferences:
"editor.insertSpaces": false,
"editor.detectIndentation": false,
Unfortunately you can't (yet). I think it would be nice to get spaces/tabs converted upon file opening - like some editors do. You can quickly convert spaces by tabs by selecting the number of indentation spaces, pressing cmd+F2 in mac or ctrl-F2 in linux/windows (to find and select all occurrences of that amount of spaces), and then pressing tab key (only once). You can also give Untabfy (or Whitespacer) a try.
Related
When I hit tab in visual studio code, the code gets indented with what seems to be "fake" spaces. If I hit tab on a new line without typing anything on the previously indented line, the spaces on the previous line seem to disappear. Is this fixable?
It sounds like the unnecssary (because there is no text on that previous line) is being trimmed automatically. To stop that disable the setting:
Editor: Trim Auto Whitespace
I think that'll result in what you want.
When writing a source file in VS Code that is styled with spaces of a specific width (maybe determined by the .editorconfig file), how can I force VS Code to treat the spaces like tabs without reformatting the file?
For example, the indent width may be 4 spaces, so rather than displaying 4 spaces in my editor, I'd rather see one tab space character with a width of 4 spaces.
The selection aspect of space-tabulated code is supported with VSCode 1.52 (Nov. 2020) and:
Sticky Tab Stops when indenting with Spaces
If you prefer to indent your code with spaces, there is a new setting called editor.stickyTabStops, which makes VS Code treat cursor movements in leading spaces similar to tabs.
Appearance
You said vscode is:
displaying 4 spaces in my editor
I assume that means you're getting those little Interpunct dot characters coming up like this ····
If you want those to go away, so they appear more consistent with tabs, go into VScode settings (JSON) and enter the following:
"editor.renderWhitespace": "selection"
Assuming everything else is default, both tabs and spaces should be rendered as regular whitespace. But that alone it doesn't really help, because it doesn't allow you to distinguish nested structures i.e. you can't tell how many levels of indentation you're at.
To fix that, there's 2 things.
(minimum) Set indent guides explicitly in your user settings, this will render vertical lines at each indentation level, no matter if the file is using tabs or spaces:
"editor.renderIndentGuides": true
(optional extra) If you want to take it further, there are a few extensions you can try, but the one i recommend is indent-rainbow. There are lots of options for it, but i have mine config'd so after a certain level of indentation it becomes more obnoxious, because i treat it as a code smell i.e. i like to minimize how much i nest if possible.
The end result of doing all this is that tabs and spaces are rendered exactly the same way, and you can't tell the difference unless you have part of your code highlighted:
Behavior
To make the behavior of indentation more consistent, the following should be in your settings if it's not already applied by default:
"editor.detectIndentation": true,
"editor.insertSpaces": true,
"editor.useTabStops": true
As for this:
source file in VS Code that is styled with spaces of a specific width (maybe determined by the .editorconfig file)
I don't think this is possible, or at least not natively. You may be able to find/write an extension that can do detection based on tabsize since there is in fact a property called:
"editor.tabSize": 4,
Not sure if this will help, but you can do selective setting overrides based on filetype, for example:
"[yaml]": {
"editor.insertSpaces": true,
"editor.tabSize": 2,
"editor.autoIndent": "advanced"
}
I'm on OSX and running Version 1.42.0 of Visual Studio Code. I have noticed that when I single click a word it will highlight. But if I copy CMD + c and then paste CMD+v, the full line will be in the clipboard. This causes problems from time to time, when the screen has given me every indication that I have only selected a single word. Is there some setting that I can set that will make the default behavior to select a word on a single quote and never ghost select a full line?
What it looks like when I single click a word:
And what it looks like after I've copied and pasted:
After filing an issue, it turns out that this behavior is by design.
The word the cursor is on (from a single click) is highlighted along with every occurrence of that word. The word is not selected (that would be a deeper blue).
By default copying without a selection copies the current line.
This in my opinion is an Accessibility issue, as there are strong visual clues that a word is selected. I have found that the behavior can be made more intuitive if you set these to settings.
// Controls whether copying without a selection copies the current line.
"editor.emptySelectionClipboard": false,
// Controls whether the editor should highlight semantic symbol occurrences.
"editor.occurrencesHighlight": false
With these two settings the word the cursor is on will not be highlighted (nor any other occurrences of that word). And if you do happen to copy, with an empty selection, the editor will behave similar to how other applications behave and not copy the current line.
Is it possible to make VSCode keep indents on empty lines?
Could not find such a setting neither natively nor in "Beautify" extension.
Example of desired behavior:
UPDATE: eventually I've just switched to Prettier - and never had to think about code style again as it's just being formatted automatically for me.
Go to File > Preferences > Settings. On the right side, add the line:
,"editor.trimAutoWhitespace": false
It worked for me perfectly.
Bit of an old question, but I found that a combination of the settings:
"editor.trimAutoWhitespace": false,
"editor.renderWhitespace": "all"
...worked for me.
NOTE: (19/03/2021)
It appears that this issue, registered on GitHub, is still an open case.
As of: 2022-02-01
Here is the solution that worked for me even with VSCODE formatting(linting) on:
There are two native VSCODE settings that format your code automatically:
"editor.formatOnSave": true,
"editor.formatOnType": true,
These settings affect your text editor only if
"editor.defaultFormatter" is not null
Here are the problems
The "editor.trimAutoWhitespace" VSCODE setting solves the problem but only works on the "editor.formatOnType" autoformat, when you save the document this setting is ignored.
You may also want to trimAutoWhitespaces on all cases but the ones where you are leaving an indent on an empty row. (this was my case).
In my case, while coding, I test my code in the terminal chunck by chunck. The problem with, in my case, python is that the end of a for loops and a conditional is defined by indentation. In this case since the terminal run the code line by line, and not in chuncks, with the removal of the indentation, the terminal thinks that the for and if commands are finished before they actually are.
Here is the solution:
Never define an edit.defaultFormatter in your VSCODE settings define it per language.
How do you do that?
Change VSCODE "editor.defaultFormatter" to null as in:
"editor.defaultFormatter": null,
Change the language formatter to your prefered one. In my case:
python.formatting.provider": "black"
VSCODE gives you the possibility of choosing a formatting (linting) provider for any language. These providers' rules are way more detailed than the VSCode native rules. In VS code press CRTL+SHIFT+P and search for "preferences: Configure Language Specific Settings...". Then define your formatting provider for said language.
Every provider (in my case "black") provides the option of ignoring some sort of formatting rule. Set the ignore argument for this provider.
In my case I only ignore 2 rules and my setting is:
"python.formatting.blackArgs": [ "--ignore=E501,W293" ],
Rule E501 = Row with more than 80 character.
Rule W293 = Empty Row containing only WhiteSpaces.
Ignoring W293 allows the Auto Trim White Spaces to keep working for every kind of trailing White Spaces except for the case referred to in W293.
I had the same issue but after removing :
"editor.autoIndent": "none"
I was good to go.
Timestamp:
2021, using VS Code v1.56.2
Use Case:
You use editor.action.trimTrailingWhitespace. Later you wish to write new code in a function. You navigate to a blank line within the function, but discover this line isn't indented and is completely empty. In this scenario, you have four choices:
Hit Tab multiple times until your cursor is at the proper indentation.
Navigate up to a line with proper indentation, press End, then press Enter.
Click your mouse to the right of a properly indented line, then press Enter.
Press Ctrl + ] repeatedly to indent the empty line.[See Footnote 1]
This answer automates this workflow by inserting the indentation for you (when you navigate to an empty line surrounded by indented lines).
Background:
Spent 3 hours trying all of the solutions on this page (and many different extensions). Couldn't find anything else which worked.
Solution via Extension
implicit-indent Extension by jemc:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jemc.vscode-implicit-indent
Automatically indents an empty line when navigated to (if its surrounding lines are indented).
Functionality
From experimenting, here's how implicit-indent seems to work:
Checks and matches either tab or space indentation automatically.
Determines spaces or tabs based on indentation of surrounding text, regardless of editor settings.[See Footnote 2]
Clicking on an empty line automatically indents to match surroundings.
If pressing the up ↑ or down ↓ arrow key navigates the caret (a.k.a. text cursor) to an empty line, implicit-indent will automatically indent the line and place the cursor to the right of the indentation (making it feel the same as if the line were already indented).
-> Before ↑ or ↓ is pressed, it doesn't matter what column the caret is on, this extension will trigger regardless.
Navigating to an empty line matches nested indentation.
Assume you have the following:
Where |n| represents a line
and c represents the caret / text cursor
and only line |2| is empty.
|1| indented line
|2| (empty line)
|3| c indented line
^ assume caret is on line |3|
(caret can be at any column)
Pressing the up ↑ arrow key results in the following:
|1| indented line
|2| c
|3| indented line
^ Line |2| (previously empty)
is automatically indented to
match nested indentation
of line |3|
and the caret is automatically moved
to the end of the inserted whitespace
(as if the line were already indented).
VS Code
As of 2021 May, the following GitHub issues are still unresolved:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/49661
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/54210
https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/1980
https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/1680
Using implicit-indent is the only workaround I've discovered so far.
I'll amend this answer when automatic indentation is added to VS Code's native settings.
[Footnote 1]
As an alternative to this extension, you can use Tab or the following indent/unindent functionality built-in to VS Code to manually indent an empty line. Slightly out of scope, but it's a good hotkey to know about.
Default built-in hotkeys are:
Hotkey: CTRL + ]
Command: editor.action.indentLines
What it does:
Indent current line (if no selection)
or indent all selected or partially-selected lines.
Hotkey: CTRL + [
Command: editor.action.outdentLines
What it does:
"Outdent" (a.k.a "unindent" a.k.a dedent)
current line (if no selection)
or outdent all selected or partially-selected lines.
[Footnote 2]
Note: regardless of whether you use this extension or not, you can quickly replace your current document's indentation (to either leading tabs or leading spaces) by using the following VS Code commands:
editor.action.indentationToTabs
editor.action.indentationToSpaces
That is probably eslint (and/or beautify) doing that. Look at
"no-trailing-spaces": ["error", { "skipBlankLines": false }],
I have that in my eslintrc.json file and so I get errors on blank lines with spaces or tabs on them. Setting "skipBlankLines" to true might work for you.
Answer edited as for VSC version 1.56.2 and newer.
The command editor.action.insertLineAfter makes a new line and moves the cursor there preserving the indentation.
To bind that command to Enter key, go to your keyboard shortcuts (press ctrl + k ctrl + s) then press the page with the pivot arrow icon on the far right top.
add the following inside keybindings.json to look like so:
// Place your key bindings in this file to override the defaults
[
{
"key": "enter",
"command": "editor.action.insertLineAfter",
"when": "editorTextFocus && !editorReadonly"
},
]
It worked for my without re-opening of VSC
I was having this issue with writing Flutter code.
Only solution for me was to change my default formatter to Flutter.
UPDATE: I also needed to disable Dart: Enable SDK Formatter
When creating a Gist on Github there is a setting for indentation (tabs or spaces; size 2, 4, or 8). After setting indents to tabs size 4, it changes to tabs size 8 after I save it. Editing it afterwords doesn't do anything. Other settings don't produce the expected result either. Am I misunderstanding this feature somehow? Can't find any documentation regarding this.
I replaced tabs with four spaces in Notepad++ (Ctrl+H), and it works. You can use any numbers of spaces.
Those tabs are automatically displayed as a 8-character-tab in Github Gist.
This is happening because while writing the code, you used the tab key which inserted 8 spaces. Here's a solution that I use.
Copy all your code to a local file and open it in the vi editor.
cat>temp.js
ctrl+shift+v to paste and ctrl+d to save.
vim temp.js (Or change the extension as per your file.)
Run the following command that I found from here. This will half the existing space.
:%s;^\(\s\+\);\=repeat(' ', len(submatch(0))/2);g
Press the esc key then :x and enter key to save and exit vi.
Copy the code in your temp.js file and paste it in your gist with spaces as 4.
Convert the indentation from Tabs to Spaces or Spaces to Tabs by using vscode with the easy and simple following steps.
Open the file with vscode.
Press,
On MacOS, command + shift + p
On Windows, ctrl + shift + p
Type "convert indentation to spaces" and select then option. (As shown in the below fig)
Save the file. (ctrl+s / ⌘+s)