TabToSpaceConverter

TabToSpaceConverter is a Sublime Text plugin that converts tab characters in a file to spaces and applies your new tab width setting to it; while preserving tab based inline alignments.

Batch converting is supported.

Overview

• The Problem
• The Solution
• Installation
• Usage
• Similar Plugins
• License

The Problem

Let's say you have a file that uses hard tabs for indendation and for inline alignment:

And the above file is created with tab_size = 8 setting, so the inline alignment only works when the tab_size is 8.

And then you want to adapt the file to a different styleguide, which uses 4 spaces for indentation. When you open the file with the new settings, you will see:

To apply the new styleguide to the file, you would normally use the Sublime Text menu in the status bar (Convert Indentation to Spaces):

Which would give you the below result, breaking the inline alignment:

The Solution

Use this plugin and get the below result, as you would expect:

Installation

You can install the plugin via:

• Package Manager by searching TabToSpaceConverter
• git clone https://github.com/maliayas/SublimeText_TabToSpaceConverter.git TabToSpaceConverter
• Downloading the zip of the repo and extracting into Packages/TabToSpaceConverter

The plugin is developed for Sublime Text 3 and above. It's not tested on Sublime Text 2; however it may still work there, so you can give it a try if you have to.

Usage

This plugin is meant to be used with a keybinding. It's not defined by default, because it needs some configuration. You should click the Preferences > Key Bindings menu and then add a keybinding like this:

{
    "keys"      : ["ctrl+alt+t"],
    "command"   : "tab_to_space_converter",
    "args"      : {"previous_tab_size": 8, "all_views": false}
}

• previous_tab_size: In order the plugin to preserve inline alignments, it has to know what tab_size setting was used when the file was created.

• all_views: If you set this to true, all the open views will be converted. To save all those files, you can use the File > Save All menu.

You don't have to provide your current tab_size setting to the plugin, just set it in the Sublime Text and the plugin will read it.

Similar Plugins

Other plugins that are similar to this one (they don't do the same task though):

• Normalize Indentation (GitHub)
• Indent Size (GitHub)

License

TabToSpaceConverter is released under the MIT License.