Set tabs instead of spaces when programming

Question

I have been using Emacs for a while and it has been one of my favorite editors of all time, even more so than Vim. However, I've had a problem in regards to setting tabs and spaces.

Whenever I try to program in C or C++, whenever it auto-indents, it uses spaces instead of tabs. However, I would prefer it if they were hard tabs that appeared visually as 4 spaces.

Right now in my ~/.emacs.d/init.el, I have this:

(setq tab-width 4)
(setq c-default-style "linux")
(setq-default c-basic-offset 4
          tab-width 4
          indent-tabs-mode t)

I know that there isn't anything else conflicting in the init.el that could lead to it being overridden. So far nothing that I've tried online as of yet has been able to fix it, including searching the EmacsWiki, Stack Overflow, and Emacs Stack Exchange.

I'm using GNU Emacs 26.3 on Ubuntu GNU/Linux 20.04.

Answer 1

The usual warnings apply, of course: your nice 4-wide TABs indentation may look like crap in someone else's editor unless they also happen to have theirs set to 4-wide TABs (the historical standard, which Emacs follows, is that TABs occupy 8 columns).

So, assuming you're still happy with this idea:

Your code should do the trick I think, except the (tab-width 4) will signal an error (because tab-width is not a function) and stop processing the rest of your init file.

Answer 2

Turns out all I needed was to add this:

(setq backward-delete-char-untabify-method 'hungry)