How to replace all tab characters in a file by sequences of white-spaces in intellij?

Question

Given a file in my project, I want to be able to replace all of the tab characters in the file with white spaces. Is there any way to do this in intellij?

Trumpery

Answer 1

Go to Edit | Convert Indents , and then choose To Spaces or To Tabs respectively. It's in the documentation: Changing identation

Brocky

Do you think it's possible to replace tabs with spaces in all files of a project? When I close all my files, the options To Spaces and To Tabs become inactive – Headrick

Note that this only converts the tabs at the start of a line. Tabs in the middle of a line (between other text) are not touched. – Vip

Answer 2

Replace only tabs used for indentation

• Ctrl + Shift + A

• type "To Spaces" > Enter

Replace all tabs

• Ctrl + R
• check Regex
• Enter \t and spaces

• Replace all

Filbert

Note that your search and replace (ctrl-r) will always convert a tab to a fixed number of spaces. It does not do a tabulation where you can line things up from one line to the next by using a tab. The indention trick, however, does indeed line things up. – Samalla

Replace Ctrl with Cmd for Mac and works on IntelliJ 2018.3 – Prothesis

It seems clion is lacking in this area a bit. While it's true that using a regex conversion doesn't keep things aligned properly, it appears to be the ONLY way to ensure there are no tabs left in the file. – Anywheres