How to change tab width in terminal in Ubuntu 10.04

Solution 1:

You can set the tab width on any terminal to 4 (for example) by using the following command:

tabs -4

You can also set an explicit tablist. Consider looking at the man page.

Solution 2:

If you are referring to using the Tab key in the terminal, I found this at UF. Ubuntu Forums Thread #7788701:

A possibility is setting the spacing in the application you are using via the terminal. For example in vim - :set tabstop=4 .

Or you could look into the man page for the expand command with man expand. Example of usage - expand -t 4 mytextfile.txt - this would convert the tab spacing when viewing a file from the default 8 to 4.