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The Tabs dialog controls both the operation of the Tab key, and the interpretation of tab characters within a file.

The first field, Tab Spacing, controls how NEdit responds to tab characters in a file. On most Unix and VMS systems the conventional interpretation of a tab character is to advance the text position to the nearest multiple of eight characters (a tab spacing of 8). However, many programmers of C and other structured languages, when given the choice, prefer a tab spacing of 3 or 4 characters. Setting a three or four character hardware tab spacing is useful and convenient as long as your other software tools support it. Unfortunately, on Unix and VMS systems, system utilities, such as more, and printing software can't always properly display files with other than eight character tabs.

Selecting "Emulate Tabs" will cause the Tab key to insert the correct number of spaces or tabs to reach the next tab stop, as if the tab spacing were set at the value in the "Emulated tab spacing" field. Backspacing immediately after entering an emulated tab will delete it as a unit, but as soon as you move the cursor away from the spot, NEdit will forget that the collection of spaces and tabs is a tab, and will treat it as separate characters. To enter a real tab character with "Emulate Tabs" turned on, use Ctrl+Tab.

In generating emulated tabs, and in Shift Left, Paste Column, and some rectangular selection operations, NEdit inserts blank characters (spaces or tabs) to preserve the alignment of non-blank characters. The bottom toggle button in the Tabs dialog instructs NEdit whether to insert tab characters as padding in such situations. Turning this off, will keep NEdit from automatically inserting tabs. Some software developers prefer to keep their source code free of tabs to avoid its misinterpretation on systems with different tab character conventions.

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