Get rid of tabs in Emacs – The Lazy Economist

If you work with other on text files, you often run into the problem that one of the programmers is using tabs set to 4, another to 8 spaces. For this reason, I always save my files without tabs. In Emacs there is a command to do this “untabify-buffer”, but I usually forget to do this.

Searching the internet I found the following code at stackoverflow.com, to do it automatically as soon as you save the file.

(defun untabify-buffer ()
  "Untabify current buffer"
  (interactive)
  (untabify (point-min) (point-max)))

(defun progmodes-hooks ()
  "Hooks for programming modes"
  (yas/minor-mode-on)
  (add-hook 'before-save-hook 'progmodes-write-hooks))

(defun progmodes-write-hooks ()
  "Hooks which run on file write for programming modes"
  (prog1 nil
    (set-buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)
    (untabify-buffer)))


(add-hook 'gams-mode-hook 'progmodes-hooks)
(add-hook 'ess-mode-hook 'progmodes-hooks)
(add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'progmodes-hooks)

(defun untabify-buffer ()

"Untabify current buffer"

(interactive)

(untabify (point-min) (point-max)))

(defun progmodes-hooks ()

"Hooks for programming modes"

(yas/minor-mode-on)

(add-hook 'before-save-hook 'progmodes-write-hooks))

(defun progmodes-write-hooks ()

"Hooks which run on file write for programming modes"

(prog1 nil

(set-buffer-file-coding-system 'utf-8-unix)

(untabify-buffer)))

(add-hook 'gams-mode-hook 'progmodes-hooks)

(add-hook 'ess-mode-hook 'progmodes-hooks)

(add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'progmodes-hooks)

You can define your own hooks for other modes.

If you would use the untabify-buffer as a common hook, you can run into problems, because every file will be untabified.