How to disable auto changing tabs to spaces in the code in Intellij Idea?

Question

How to disable auto changing tabs to spaces and removing empty lines, whitespaces in the sourcefiles after it opened?

In other words if the line contains tabs and spaces in one line Idea shouldn't change them. For example if file contains "-->-->....-->public void setAttribute();" Idea shouldn't change tabs to spaces or spaces to tabs. I can disable all autoformattig.

Answer 1

To restate the problem, you want the editor to not affect the whitespace indentations. Spaces should remain spaces and tabs should remain tabs.

I'm having a similar problem. It looks like IntelliJ has this feature:

Settings > Editor > Code Style, Indents Detection section, Detect and use existing file indents for editing option

Unfortunately, I don't think I can get it to work as expected for myself (version 2016.3.6), but it seems to be working for others.

Here's the original jetbrains blog post about it.

Answer 2

There is an option 'keep indents on empty line'

Answer 3

Assuming Java: Settings > Code Style > Java > Tabs and Indents > Use tab character. You can do the same for other languages too.