Question

I need to be able to set the tab settings for the following file types:

• .rb: 2 soft spaces
• .css, .html.erb: 4 space tabs

I have tried the following, but none of it seems to alter my default tab settings for each of the file types.

;; js-mode-hook has also been tried
(add-hook 'javascript-mode-hook 
      '(lambda() 
        (setq tab-width 4)))

(add-hook 'css-mode-hook 
      '(lambda() 
        (setq tab-width 4)))

(add-hook 'html-mode-hook 
      '(lambda() 
        (setq tab-width 8)))

I am pretty new to emacs so my knowledge of configuration is pretty low.

Answer 1

In emacs each mode has it’s own indentation style. The main command to indent (bound to TAB) is indent-for-tab-command.
This command calls mode specific indentation function found in the variable indent-line-function. So each mode has it’s own way of doing it.

For Ruby (for my emacs 2 is a default):

 (setq ruby-indent-level 2)

For CSS (again, default is 4 for me):

 (setq css-indent-offset 4)

Unfortunately SGML mode (on which HTML mode is based) has a very simple indentation mechanism and apparently the level is not configurable.
See the source code of sgml-calculate-indent function.

I personally find it weird. I am not writing HTML, but you can try to modify the sgml-calculate-indent function yourself :). Learn some lisp.

I am using js2 mode, and it indents perfectly by default. For js you have to search for js-indent-level or something similar.

Cheers.