@Nicholas-Piazza-0 said in How to eliminate auto tabs?:
The spacebar would only insert that line of tabs after I started a new line.
Spacebar does not insert a line of tabs, even after hitting enter to start a new line.
When you have auto-indent turned on, hitting ENTER at the end of one line will create a new line, automatically indented with either spaces or tabs, depending on your active language’s tab settings (Settings > Preferences > Language > Tab Settings). It’s the creating-new-line-using-ENTER that puts in the indentation spaces or tabs.
Your screenshot was insufficient for me to tell you what’s going on:
You didn’t include the line numbers, so I cannot see if you have line wrap on
You didn’t include context, so I cannot see the line before where you hit ENTER, so I cannot guess how far it should be indented
You didn’t include the status bar at the bottom, so I don’t know what file language you have active
Also, you should share your settings for Settings > Preferences > Language > Tab Settings for the language of your active file, because then we know what your tab settings are for that language.
Even better, a screen-capture-video animated gif, showing your current file, then you clicking and hitting ENTER, then showing you typing the space, would show us exactly what’s going on. (I use screentogif to capture and automatically upload to imgur, then embed the imgur image using syntax ![](https://i.imgur.com/nASYsAz.gif) to have the forum show the animated gif from imgur’s site – making sure to use the i.imgur.com URL. Unfortunately, while the forum allows pasting in static images like gif or png directly, without using an external host, animated gifs must be externally hosted. You can use any such tool you want; this is just a suggestion if you don’t already have one to use.)
As it is, I just think your previous line is hugely indented (possibly with View > Word Wrap turned on, so you might have thought you were on a different line, even though you’re really just wrapped on the same line), and you hit ENTER, and since you have the active language set to indent using Tab characters, it indents with the correct number of tabs based on the previous line. I don’t think it’s the spacebar at all.
update: actually, you might have a plugin that helpfully converts N leading spaces into another tab character, so maybe after you’ve typed 4 (or whatever N is for that plugin) spaces, the plugin automatically converts those to a single tab, and as you continue to hold down the spacebar, the plugin continues to convert the groups of N into another tab. Sharing your ?-menu’s Debug Info will show which plugins you have, and maybe someone here knows of a plugin that behaves that way (I do not, off the top of my head).
update 2: And I have confirmed that something similar is true, natively: if your language is set to tab-indent, and you have mixed tabs and spaces at the beginning of a line (like cb803e9c-cfbc-4eab-811d-fe04e1017d0f-image.png ), if you hit TAB at the end of that line, it will convert them all to tabs (874df7ec-d40b-4fe8-8535-4cdc164f69b3-image.png )