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How does one change the tabstop in TextEdit.app for Snow Leopard?

The current tabstop is 8 spaces. I would like to change this to 4 spaces.
Is there any way to achieve this?

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1 Answer

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Yes.

  1. Make sure Format > Text > Show Ruler is enabled.
  2. Locate the tab stops in the ruler (Fig. 1).
  3. Move the first one to 1/4 inch (Fig. 2).

Fig1 Fig2 Alternatively, you could use something like Keyboard Maestro, TextExpander, or BetterTouchTool to map four spaces to the Tab key. This is the only way I'm aware of to do it for plain text files (.txt).

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If your document has existing content, select all of the content before making this adjustment so the tab stops are applied to all of the paragraphs. – bneely Feb 11 '12 at 21:24
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This works for rich text documents. It seems not to show a ruler for plain text documents. I'll keep this in mind. Thanks! – phwd Feb 11 '12 at 21:52
Oh, sorry, didn't realize it didn't work for .txt files. Oh well! – timothymh Feb 12 '12 at 1:24
@phwd Added an alternative for .txt files. :) – timothymh Apr 4 '12 at 20:49
Sweet looking into them now – phwd Apr 4 '12 at 20:55

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