Question

In PhpStorm, when dealing with soft/smart-tabs can I jump back to the previous tabstop with one key press or combo?

I tried Shift+Tab but it doesn’t jump back to the tabstop, it jumps back by the size of the softtab.

Here is an illustration where a soft tab is 4 spaces:

Notabs (0 spaces)
••••Tabstop1 (1 Tab)
••••••••Tabstop2 (2 Tabs)
••••••* My cursors is here in between Tabstop 1 + 2
••••••••<- another Tab press moves me to Level2
••••<- I want to get here, back to Level1 (in one key press)
••<- Shift+Tab moves me here (back 4 full spaces, a full soft tab)

In retrospect I can live with just backspacing a 3 to 1 times, and use Shift+Tab when traversing a tabstop or more of distance, but I’m just curious if there is a direct analogy to the way the Tab key works for un-tabbing stuff.

Answer 1

There is a little combo: press Tab, then press Shift+Tab.

It is not in one key press, but it is regardless of number of spaces (1 or 2 or 3) you want to jump over. No need to calculate how many backspaces you need: every time press 2 times.