Xfce Forum

mculver

Member

Registered: 2026-02-10

Posts: 1

mousepad editor - pressing tab

Ubuntu with Cinnamon. I've been trying a number of different text editors. Don't want anything fancy, just a note taking editor. Today I installed Mousepad which is great for the most part. Something I've noticed: the tab setting in Mousepad preferences is 8 by default, which is what I want. When I press tab on the keyboard it goes 4 characters. Many editors are like this. Is there any way to have pressing tab be equal to number of characters set in preferences? Is this an OS or DE or app thing? Thank you.

mint4all

Member

From: off the map

Registered: 2018-08-21

Posts: 298

Re: mousepad editor - pressing tab

Ubuntu with Cinnamon. I've been trying a number of different text editors. Don't want anything fancy, just a note taking editor. Today I installed Mousepad which is great for the most part. Something I've noticed: the tab setting in Mousepad preferences is 8 by default, which is what I want. When I press tab on the keyboard it goes 4 characters. Many editors are like this. Is there any way to have pressing tab be equal to number of characters set in preferences? Is this an OS or DE or app thing? Thank you.

Greetings to you, and welcome to this forum!

As far as I can tell, and have tested, the tabs appear correctly in the saved files. What I did notice, though, the VISUAL appearance of the tabs depend on the font you have set in mousepad's preferences/settings. Personally, I prefer proportional fonts, and the tabs' indents show up wildly inconsistent. Just keep in mind that the font you selected doesn't get saved with a file (as far as I have looked into it, but there might be some hidden meta-tag somewhere, idk).

Cheers, m4a

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