Sublime Text 3, convert spaces to tabs

Question

On the bottom right-hand corner of your Sublime Text window, you'll see an indentation indicator that looks a lot like this:

Clicking it will open a menu with options to adjust your indentation preferences, and more importantly, Convert Indentation to Tabs/Spaces.

The same menu is listed under View -> Indentation.

At the bottom of the Sublime window, you'll see something representing your tab/space setting.

You'll then get a dropdown with a bunch of options. The options you care about are:

• Convert Indentation to Spaces
• Convert Indentation to Tabs

Apply your desired setting to the entire document.

Hope this helps.

As you might already know, you can customize your indention settings in Preferences.sublime-settings, for example:

"detect_indentation": true,
"tab_size": 4,
"translate_tabs_to_spaces": false

This will set your editor to use tabs that are 4 spaces wide and will override the default behavior that causes Sublime to match the indention of whatever file you're editing. With these settings, re-indenting the file will cause any spaces to be replaced with tabs.

As far as automatically re-indenting when opening a file, that's not quite as easy (but probably isn't a great idea since whitespace changes wreak havoc on file diffs). What might be a better course of action: you can map a shortcut for re-indention and just trigger that when you open a new file that needs fixing.

You can use the command palette to solve this issue.

Step 1: Ctrl + Shift + P (to activate the command palette)

Step 2: Type "Indentation", Choose "Indentation: Convert to Tabs"

In my case, this line solved the problem:

"translate_tabs_to_spaces": false