Emacs Tip: No Tabs Whatsoever

I my last post, I tried to describe how to get rid of tabs in Python mode, and managed to not get it quite right. The previous command, python-guess-indent, really only turns off the indent guessing, but doesn't actually remove the tabs. It just happens that tabs are only used for every other indentation level. I had only tested the first level and missed that the tabs are still inserted later in.

So, to get rid of all tabs all the time, add the line (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) to your .emacs file. This turns off the replacement of spaces with tabs globally. Hooray! tabs are gone.

Emacs Tip: Troublesome Tabs in Python Mode

The Python mode in Emacs 22 (using python.el, not the python-mode.el from XEmacs) has a nice feature of deducing the spacing style based on the spacing and tabs that already exist in the file. Most of the time, it works really well, but, it does make getting rid of large tabs difficult. So, if you're having problems getting rid of tabs, simply toggle the indent guessing mode with the command python-guess-indent and just use the default Python mode settings for indentation.