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I would like to Change behavior of tab erasing in the WinEdt editor. When I insert a tab (pressing the tab key), it does insert a tab, but if right after that I press backspace to erase it, it erases single space characters, one at a time. Thus, in order to erase a full tab I need to press backspace e.g. 4 times. Is it possible to change the program behavior so that backspace deletes the full tab inserted (just as, e.g., Notepad++ does)? Thanks and regards, Jorge.

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    Are you really sure that you insert a TAB after pressing the <kbd>Tab</kbd> key and not 4 spaces? Nonetheless to "delete" the TAB/4 spaces you can press <kbd>Shift</kbd>+<kbd>Tab</kbd> to delete them. – Stefan Pinnow May 30 '18 at 21:21
  • Thanks for the tip, Stefan! Shift+Tab does seem to erase the tab. As to what am I actually inserting, I don't really know: is there a way to make Winedt display the whitespace characters like space, tab, line return, etc? – dontpanic May 30 '18 at 22:01
  • @StefanPinnow Would you write an answer? – Arzigoglu May 31 '18 at 4:32
  • @Arzigoglu, sure. Done. – Stefan Pinnow May 31 '18 at 4:59
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If you have written your document in WinEdt it is very likely that there are no (real) TABs in it. By default pressing ↹ TAB 4 spaces are inserted.

Nonetheless instead of using ⇦ Backspace you could press ⇧ Shift+↹ TAB to delete either a TAB or (up to) 4 spaces.

To set options regarding the TAB in WinEdt goto
        Options > Options Interface > Font Schemes: ... > Tabs
where you can e.g. set

  • the TAB length
  • how TABs "behave"
  • if TABs should be drawn
  • if TABs are allowed as input chars
  • if a TAB should be inserted when ↹ TAB is pressed

After applying your settings don't forget to press the
        Load Current Script
button!

(To test, if you have TABs inside your document you could also do a simple search in the file(s), but therefore you have to ensure that you really have a TAB in the search bar. I ensure this by copying it from another application.)

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  • Thank you guys for your help. Using the aforementioned procedure, I set TAB_ALLOW_KEYBOARD=1 and now the editor is actually inserting tabs instead of spaces. – dontpanic May 31 '18 at 15:57

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