How many white spaces are recommended for tabs in markdown?

[mendax1234]

Hi, l want to use markdown to write something, and l use vscode as my editor. However, l find that vscode's default white spaces for tab in markdown is two. Should l change it to 4? And how to do that for markdown but not change the tab settings for other non-markdown files?

Thanks for replying!

[facelessuser]

I would probably change it for Markdown at least. How you use tabs in other languages is really up to you. Conventions may vary depending on the community.

[alexvoss]

For Markdown you need at least one tab or 4 spaces for indenting pre-formatted code. Spaces also come into play when doing lists and because of the list symbol or numbering 4 spaces make more sense there as well. So, setting it to 4 would seem to make sense.

I searched the VS Code settings for indent and found "Editor: Detect Indentation", which turns on filetype specific settings. I could, however, not find a setting for Markdown - or JavaScript. It might be that selecting this just puts you at the mercy of what Microsoft collectively think is right. An alternative might be to use a Workspace-specific setting?

Caveat: am only an occasional VS Code user. IMHO 4 spaces is good for all languages. Code that ends up being too deeply nested should probably be refactored. So, I

[squidfunk]

Another solution might be to create an .editorconfig, which allows you to define indent, line breaks, etc. for each language. It's a standard that all popular editors support and it ensures that your contributors use the same settings when creating PRs.

For reference, here's our .editorconfig:

mkdocs-material/.editorconfig

Lines 21 to 36 in 9888723

	# Top-level config
	root = true
	# All files
	[*]
	charset = utf-8
	indent_style = space
	indent_size = 2
	end_of_line = lf
	insert_final_newline = true
	trim_trailing_whitespace = true
	# Python
	[*.py]
	indent_style = space
	indent_size = 4

[RokeJulianLockhart]

#6026 (reply in thread)

@alexvoss, github/markup#1142 (comment) appears to demonstrate otherwise - that there merely needs to be a single character of whitespace, and that it needs to be consistent across lines. However, it's not well supported.

[squidfunk]

@RokeJulianLockhart GitHub uses CommonMark, while Python Markdown is an implementation of (the non-standard) Gruber Markdown, which mandates four spaces for lists, eight for sublists etc. This is a common pitfall among users, but we currently cannot just swap out Python Markdown with CommonMark, as it is closely intertwined with the MkDocs ecosystem.