Tabs and Spaces

Settings for tab size and tab inserting behavior can be found in Tools → Options → Formatting page.

Tab size – default tab size (in char count) for documents. But do not mix this value with Indent Size. Indent size determined from content, if default size cannot be resolved (not enough data for statistic) default indent size from syntax schema is used. Indent size and detection mode can be changed for a specific document from within the status bar or for all documents (default setting) with flag Auto-Detect default indent from Do on Load section of the same options page.

There are several modes for tabs and space insertion in HippoEDIT:

• Auto (determine from content) – editor tries to find out from existing content of the document, if tabs are used or not. If tabs are not found then spaces should be inserted when indenting is done (equals to Replace Tabs by Spaces mode).
• Keep as Typed – default setting. Editor inserts symbols as typed. Tab symbol for tab and spaces are not merged into tabs.
• Replace Tabs by Spaces – inserted tabs replaced by the editor to the corresponding count of spaces (depends on tab size and text position)
• Replace Spaces by Tabs – continues typed spaces group replaced by one Tab symbol. Count of replaced spaces depends on tab size and current text position.

If Replace Tabs by Spaces or Spaces by Tabs mode is selected, the corresponding conversion will be applied to document during saving.

Trim white spaces at the end of line – if enabled, editor trims trailing whitespace (spaces, tabs etc) from text lines and saves a trimmed version of the document. The document itself is not updated.

Check encoding accuracy – if set, editor will check that all characters from the document can be saved with current encoding without data loss (because HippoEDIT internally process text as Unicode, it can happen that some Unicode characters cannot be save using current encoding and will be lost or replaced by substitution symbol).