Tools: Emacs

By default, emacs will use spaces to indent your C code.

Of course, you don't want that.

In order to customise your Emacs configuration, you'll need to modify the file .emacs in your home directory. If this file does not already exist, you just need to create it.

Don't put anything in your .emacs you don't understand!

To tell emacs to use tabs instead, you just need to put the following lines in your .emacs:

(setq c-default-style "bsd"
      c-basic-offset 8
      tab-width 8
      indent-tabs-mode t)

Here, the size of a tab character in Emacs is set to 8, so Emacs will display 8 spaces on your screen to represent a single tab. You can modify this value, to put a smaller one if you want, but just keep in mind that it's a good habit to keep an indentation of 8 columns: it makes your code more readable.

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If you want to highlight lines exceeding 80 characters and trailing whitespace, you can add this to your ~/.emacs:

(require 'whitespace)
(setq whitespace-style '(face empty lines-tail trailing))
(global-whitespace-mode t)

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You should also add this line to your ~/.emacs, if you want the current column along with the line in Emacs:

(setq column-number-mode t)