How to change tab width in terminal in Ubuntu 10.04

Question

When I press tab in terminal it goes very far. So I would like to change tab width, make it smaller. Anyone could help me, please?

score 41 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 03 '13 at 21:32

41

You can set the tab width on any terminal to 4 (for example) by using the following command:

tabs -4

You can also set an explicit tablist. Consider looking at the man page.

answered Feb 03 '13 at 21:32

Talia Stocks

510

3

This breaks scp and rsync on Ubuntu 19, i.e., scp myfile.txt user@ubuntu19:/tmp/, if the ubuntu19 has tabs -4 on its ~/.bashrc file. Instead, use [[ $- == *i* ]] && tabs -4 on your ~/.bashrc and this problem will be fixed because it will make the command only run on interactive shells: Getting stty: standard input: Inappropriate ioctl for device when using scp through an ssh tunnel – user Dec 03 '20 at 18:52
Thanks for the tip. – Talia Stocks Dec 05 '20 at 00:55

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 28 '11 at 17:08

If you are referring to using the Tab key in the terminal, I found this at UF. Ubuntu Forums Thread #7788701:

A possibility is setting the spacing in the application you are using via the terminal. For example in vim - :set tabstop=4 .

Or you could look into the man page for the expand command with man expand. Example of usage - expand -t 4 mytextfile.txt - this would convert the tab spacing when viewing a file from the default 8 to 4.

How to change tab width in terminal in Ubuntu 10.04

2 Answers2