As a tab indentation enthusiast, I wanted to use an Angular project with tabs instead of 2 spaces. Unfortunately, there are several settings to change, and the schematics used by ng CLI command supports only spaces. Despite numerous requests (e.g. here and here), Google did not decide to introduce an option to set indentation for generated files. I went through the process of making Angular project tabbed and I’ll describe it here.

Introduction

The process will be much more comfortable if you remember to run git add . && git commit after every step to easily verify (git diff) and undo (git checkout -- .) changes.

First, create a new project (or start with your existing project):

Reformat existing code

Next, there are two options.

By the way, I’ve put together a small collection of tools I use regularly — things like time tracking, Git helpers, database utilities, and a few others that make development a bit smoother.

One is installing and using the Prettier package for formatting code:

Verify that the indentation changed with git diff and that no content was changed with git diff -w (which ignores whitespace differences).

If you don’t mind minor reformatting, mainly in JSON arrays:

-            "assets": [
-              "src/favicon.ico",
-              "src/assets"
-            ],
-            "styles": [
-              "src/styles.scss"
-            ],
+                                               "assets": ["src/favicon.ico", "src/assets"],
+                                               "styles": ["src/styles.scss"],

then leave that version.

Another possibility is using a Linux terminal or Git Bash. Open it and launch:

That command finds all files in the current folder which end in .js, .ts, .html, .css, .scss or .json and their path does not contain any of:

• /.git/
• /node_modules/
• package-lock.json

You can add more rules if necessary. It then converts the initial spaces and converts every two spaces (-t 2) to a tab.

This method shouldn’t introduce any artifacts, only the whitespaces should be changed. Verify it with git diff and git diff -w.

Configure the Angular project to use tabs

As many as 3 files have to be changed to start using tab indentation.

First, the .editorconfig file that determines the setting used by your editor when you edit files. This has to be checked first (so you don’t enter spaces while editing other configuration files).

Next, the tslint.json file determines the linting options for TypeScript.

And, finally, angular.json needs to have lintFix: true added to all schematics. Note – if you have more, list them all. Previously there was just one default, then the option disappeared but was discovered as the settings you see below.

Now, when you generate new items using CLI, e.g. ng generate component Home, it will be indented with tabs.

Read next

• Waiting for two parallel callbacks
• Angular component with varying appearance and click event
• 3 methods to retrieve an asset in Angular CLI
• Angular – enums and switch case in templates
• Angular: extract a module with existing components and important lesson about NgModule