When I first started using editors, I was a tabs person. I always set the tab size to 4 since I liked the way that looked, and used tabs instead of spaces. And it wasn’t really a philosophical reason behind it, it was very simple actually:

I really hate hitting backspace 4 times to unindent

Seems simple enough. Yes, I know you can use SHIFT-BACKSPACE or other voodoo to make it work, but I want to hit *one* key.

Because of this, I always used 4-space tabs instead of inserting spaces instead of tabs. However, at some point I started writing a project in python, and python tends to encourage spaces vs tabs. Notepad++ is my favorite editor, so I decided to write a plugin for Notepad++ to make using spaces a lot less annoying — and in particular, to make it so that when I hit backspace, it would magically eat the spaces back to the next indentation level.

In the process of trying to do this, I discovered that the Scintilla editing component actually has this functionality built-in — you just need to enable SCI_SETBACKSPACEUNINDENTS on the editor component. So I took the sample plugin for Notepad++ and added two lines of code that enabled this functionality, and it works great! Ever since then, I’ve used spaces instead of tabs, since I really can’t tell the difference — and that’s how I like it 🙂

I actually wrote this thing a rather long time ago, and never got around to actually cleaning it up and releasing it. I’ve decided to release it in its present form, since it’s so useful and very simple. It would be even better if Notepad++ had an option to enable this, but this works just as well until that happens.

This plugin is known to work in versions of Notepad++ since 4.x, and works in Notepad++ running under Wine also. Download the Notepad++ tabs plugin at my usual software page.

Note: I’ve now posted the code as a project on Github