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Currently pressing TAB in evil insert mode, runs indent-for-tab-command

I'm not sure of the exact details, but from what I can tell this is performing some kind of re-indentation, which does nothing if emacs consideres the text already indented.

I would like this to behave (like vim) where.

  • When tabs are enabled a \t is inserted *.
  • When tabs are disabled, insert n spaces, aligning to the tab-width.

Is this possible?

* by tabs enabled I mean (setq indent-tabs-mode t).

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    Why not embrace Emacs and its smart indentation? Each mode is free to set it to something smarter than indent-relative and this makes for less tab key usage if it's configured properly. You can do the same by overriding the indentation function for modes that don't behave.
    – wasamasa
    Oct 17, 2016 at 6:26
  • ^ this. Also, you might want to check this article out by Xah Lee
    – Chakravarthy Raghunandan
    Oct 17, 2016 at 6:33
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    @wasamasa: Vim/Evil have the = operator for that.
    – Nova
    Jan 10, 2017 at 4:33
  • @wasamasa re: Why not embrace Emacs and its smart indentation? - when working on larger projects not everyone uses Emacs. There might be external formatting utilities such as clang format, yet - that can be disabled for blocks of code too... in short, sometimes I just want to insert tab aligned indentation without relying on Emacs to do what I want.
    – ideasman42
    Aug 4, 2021 at 6:03

1 Answer 1

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To have tab work as it does in VIM, use tab-to-tab-stop.

(define-key evil-insert-state-map (kbd "TAB") 'tab-to-tab-stop)
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