Smart tabs are not working?

Spaces are used only when indent size is less than the configured tab size.

I ran into the very same issue. The sense of having smart tabs to me is that indentation alignment does not change independent on the tab width configured. The behavior should be to do only the first empty levels with tabs and the remainder with spaces, independent of how many spaces are needed and whether they would exceed the tab width or not, as laid out by the original poster.

Could this be made configurable in some (near) future version, please?

Volker Urban

Your understanding seems to be correct. The purpose of "Smart tabs" is not to break alignment of what was already aligned in case the tab size changes.

Could you provide a code sample with which you are having issues, and describe the desired vs. actual outcome of applying smart tabs to it?

Thanks a lot for your quick answer, Arina.

Assume the following piece of pseudo code:

void foo()
{
->if (a & b == 1) {
->->func_call(arg1, arg2, arg3);
->}
}

If I had to break the if-statement and the function call I would expect the following result:

void foo()
{
->if (a & b ==
->....1) {
->->func_call(arg1, arg2,
->->..........arg3);
->}
}

This way the "1" will always be aligned with "a" above and "arg3" will always be aligned with "arg1" above independent of the tab width.

However, the current smart tab implementation seems to do "greedy" tabs and insert as many tabs as possible and just do the last indentation below the tab width with spaces.

Volker Urban Thank you.

I created a new bug report for this in our system:

• https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-288170

Feel free to leave extra comments there for the developers.

See this article if you are not familiar with YouTrack.

Thank You, Arina!