Some programs require tab characters to work, e.g. make requires tabs in Makefiles. If gedit is configured to replace tabs with spaces, it's painful to change the settings every time or copy a character from another document.

I'm using 3.10.4 on Ubuntu 15.04.

5 Answers

You can insert a literal Tab character in gedit by using the GNOME Unicode input mode:

Ctrl + Shift + U

and then enter 9 followed by Enter. The horizontal tab character is Unicode code point U+0009. This will insert a tab regardless of your preferences to expand tabs or not.

1

You can create shortcuts to quickly change this setting:

gsettings set org.gnome.gedit.preferences.editor insert-spaces false

1

Install a plugin for gedit

1. Clone the repository git://

   mkdir -p ~/src
   cd src
   git clone git://

2. Create the plugin folder for gedit

   mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins

3. Create a symbolic link

   ln -s ~/src/makefiletab3 ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins/makefiletab3

4. Change the Python version in makefiletab3.plugin

   Open the file

   nano ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins/makefiletab3/makefiletab3.plugin

   and replace

   Loader=python

   with

   Loader=python3

5. Restart gedit and activate the plugin

3

If you wanted to insert a number of tabs into a script or document without changing the tab configuration in gedit:

• Wherever a tab is required enter a unique string of characters (e.g. tab!) to be used as a replace token when needed.
• When you need the actual tabs, use Find and Replace (CTRL+H) to find the tab! and replace with \t

Whenever you need to use a tab character instead of space characters, click on "Tab Width" in Gedit's bottom bar, and uncheck "Use Spaces" check box.

When you are done inserting your tab character(s), simply click on "Tab Width" again, and reset the number of spaces (2, 4, or 8) that represent a tab. Obviously, this only works if you are using one of the default values of 2, 4, or 8 spaces.

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