How can I customize the tab-to-space conversion factor?

By default, Visual Studio Code will try to guess your indentation options depending on the file you open.

You can turn off indentation guessing via "editor.detectIndentation": false.

You can customize this easily via these three settings for Windows in menu File → Preferences → User Settings and for Mac in menu Code → Preferences → Settings or ⌘,:

// The number of spaces a tab is equal to. This setting is overridden
// based on the file contents when `editor.detectIndentation` is true.
"editor.tabSize": 4,

// Insert spaces when pressing Tab. This setting is overriden
// based on the file contents when `editor.detectIndentation` is true.
"editor.insertSpaces": true,

// When opening a file, `editor.tabSize` and `editor.insertSpaces`
// will be detected based on the file contents. Set to false to keep
// the values you've explicitly set, above.
"editor.detectIndentation": false

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I'm running version 1.21, but I think this may apply to other versions as well.

Take a look at the bottom right-hand side of the screen. You should see something that says Spaces or Tab-Size.

Mine shows spaces, →

https://i.stack.imgur.com/9MROp.png

Click on the Spaces (or Tab-Size) Choose Indent Using Spaces or Indent using Tabs Select the amount of spaces or tabs you like.

This only works per document, not project-wide. If you want to apply it project-wide, you need to also add "editor.detectIndentation": false to your user settings.

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Note

if you are talking about prettier for tabSize, go to the section 2 of this answer

Section 1: VS Code Way

Well, if you like the developer way, Visual Studio Code allows you to specify the different file types for the tabSize. Here is the example of my settings.json with default four spaces and JavaScript/JSON two spaces:

{
  // I want my default to be 4, but JavaScript/JSON to be 2
  "editor.tabSize": 4,
  "[javascript]": {
    "editor.tabSize": 2
  },
  "[json]": {
    "editor.tabSize": 2
  },

  // This one forces the tab to be **space**
  "editor.insertSpaces": true
}

PS: Well, if you do not know how to open this file (specially in a new version of Visual Studio Code), you can:

Left-bottom gear → Settings → top right Open Settings

https://i.stack.imgur.com/UR6K9.png

Section 2: If using prettier

If you are using prettier, things may be different again, prettier has 2 level of setting for this:

User level, which you can click the extension and click setting find the keyword tabWidth Project level, which you can add/update from the root project level in file .prettierrc

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By default, Visual Studio Code auto-detects the indentation of the current open file. If you want to switch this feature off and make all indentation, for example, two spaces, you'd do the following in your User Settings or Workspace settings.

{
    "editor.tabSize": 2,

    "editor.detectIndentation": false
}

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We can control tab size by file type with EditorConfig and its EditorConfig for VS Code extension. We then can make Alt + Shift + F specific to each file type.

Installation

Open the VS Code command palette with CTRL + P and paste this:

ext install EditorConfig

Example Configuration

.editorconfig

[*]
indent_style = space

[*.{js,ts,json}]
indent_size = 2

[*.java]
indent_size = 4

[*.go]
indent_style = tab

settings.json

EditorConfig overrides whatever settings.json configures for the editor. There is no need to change editor.detectIndentation.

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If you use the prettier extension in Visual Studio Code, try adding this to the settings.json file:

"editor.insertSpaces": false,
"editor.tabSize": 4,
"editor.detectIndentation": false,

"prettier.tabWidth": 4,
"prettier.useTabs": true  // This made it finally work for me

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In Visual Studio Code version 1.31.1 or later (I think): Like sed Alex Dima, you can customize this easily via these settings for

Windows in menu File → Preferences → User Settings or use short keys Ctrl + Shift + P

Mac in menu Code → Preferences → Settings or ⌘,

https://i.stack.imgur.com/lIaep.png

https://i.stack.imgur.com/KfspU.png

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There are already lots of good answers provided by our beloved community members. I actually wanted to add the C# code tabSize and found this thread. There are many solutions I found and official VS Code docs is awesome. I just want to share my C# setting:

"[csharp]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": true,
    "editor.tabSize": 4
},

just copy and paste above code to your settings.json file and save. thanks

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CTRL + comma Search for indent using tabs Go and change Editor: Tab Size

https://i.stack.imgur.com/3yyHF.png

That's aLL

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In your bottom-right corner, you have Spaces: Spaces: 2

There you can change the indentation according to your needs: Indentation Options

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That is lonefy.vscode-js-css-html-formatter to blame. Disable it, and install HookyQR.beautify.

Now on save your tabs wouldn't be converted.

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You want to make sure your editorconfig is not conflicting with your user or workspace settings configuration, as I just had a bit of annoyance thinking the settings files settings were not being applied when it was my editor configuration undoing those changes.

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If the accepted answer on this post doesn't work, give this a try:

I had EditorConfig for Visual Studio Code installed in my editor, and it kept overriding my user settings which were set to indent files using spaces. Every time I switched between editor tabs, my file would automatically get indented with tabs even if I had converted indentation to spaces!!!

Right after I uninstalled this extension, indentation no longer changes between switching editor tabs, and I can work more comfortably rather than having to manually convert tabs to spaces every time I switch files - that is painful.

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When using TypeScript, the default tab width is always two regardless of what it says in the toolbar. You have to set "prettier.tabWidth" in your user settings to change it.

Ctrl + P, Type → user settings, add:

"prettier.tabWidth": 4

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Menu File → Preferences → Settings

Add to user settings:

"editor.tabSize": 2,
"editor.detectIndentation": false

then right click your document if you have one opened already and click Format Document to have your existing document follow these new settings.

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@alex-dima's solution from 2015 will change tab sizes and spaces for all files and @Tricky's solution from 2016 appears to only change the settings for the current file.

As of 2017, I found another solution that works on a per-language basis. Visual Studio Code was not using the proper tab sizes or space settings for Elixir, so I found that I could change the settings for all Elixir files.

I clicked on the language in the status bar ("Elixir" in my case), chose "Configure 'Elixir' language based settings...", and edited the Elixir-specific language settings. I just copied the "editor.tabSize" and "editor.insertSpaces" settings from the default settings on the left (I'm so glad those are shown) and then modified them on the right.

It worked great, and now all Elixir language files use the proper tab size and space settings.

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I had to do a lot of settings edits like the previous answers, so I don't know which made it work after a lot of modifications.

Nothing worked until I closed and openen my IDE, but the last three things I did was disable the lonefy.vscode-js-css-html-formatter, "html.format.enable": true, and restart Visual Studio.

{
    "editor.suggestSelection": "first",
    "vsintellicode.modify.editor.suggestSelection": "automaticallyOverrodeDefaultValue",
    "workbench.colorTheme": "Default Light+",
    "[html]": {
        "editor.defaultFormatter": "vscode.html-language-features",
        "editor.tabSize": 2,
        "editor.detectIndentation": false,
        "editor.insertSpaces": true
    },
    "typescript.format.insertSpaceAfterOpeningAndBeforeClosingTemplateStringBraces": true,
    "editor.tabSize": 2,
    "typescript.format.insertSpaceAfterConstructor": true,
    "files.autoSave": "afterDelay",
    "html.format.indentHandlebars": true,
    "html.format.indentInnerHtml": true,
    "html.format.enable": true,
    "editor.detectIndentation": false,
    "editor.insertSpaces": true,
}

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From the comments:

Is there a way to change tabSize per language? e.g. when editing multiple files with different languages in the same Workspace (e.g. Ruby, JavaScript, CSS, etc.) - Ruby would be 2 spaces, but CSS would be 4... usually

That is why, with VSCode 1.63 (Nov. 2021), you have:

Multiple language specific editor settings You can now configure language specific editor settings for multiple languages at once. Following example shows how you can customise settings for javascript and typescript languages together: "[javascript][typescript]": { "editor.maxTokenizationLineLength": 2500 }

In your case:

"[ruby][html]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": true,
    "editor.tabSize": 2
},
"[csharp][typescript]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": true,
    "editor.tabSize": 4
},

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I tried to change editor.tabSize to 4, but .editorConfig overrides whatever settings I had specified, so there is no need to change any configuration in user settings. You just need to edit .editorConfig file:

set indent_size = 4

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If this is for Angular 2, and the CLI is generating files which you would like differently formatted, you can edit these files to change what is generated:

npm_modules/@angular/cli/blueprints/component/files/__path__/*

Not massively recommended as an npm update will delete your work, but it has saved me a lot of time.

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User3550138 is correct. lonefy.vscode-js-css-html-formatter overrides all the settings mentioned in other answers. However, you don't have to disable or uninstall it as it can be configured.

Full instructions can be found by opening the extensions sidebar and clicking on this extension and it will display configuration instructions in the editor workspace. At least it does for me in Visual Studio Code version 1.14.1.

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