Indent with TABS instead of SPACES by default

[GrabbenD]

Visual Studio Code is extremely widespread.
Default settings have a great impact on how documents are structured worldwide.

Most people don't change this setting despite all the benefits:

• Using tabs by default allows the user to set their own width preference which doesn't affect other users to e.g. save screen real-estate with low DPI laptop/screens.
• One tab character per indentation level instead of 2 or 4 spaces will use less disk space / memory / compiler resources.
• Indent Auto-detection doesn't work with 3 spaces. This wouldn't be a problem with Tabs, it'd yield quicker detection and reduce risk of wrong assumption about indentation size.
• Historically tab is still the character specifically designed for indentation.

This is a low hanging fruit which has great benefits with no downsides 🙂

[GrabbenD]

Workaround

This configuration works extremely well thus far:

• It respects the format of the file you're viewing.
  • This is useful as tabs are preferred when programming / in code files (bonus: I've noticed Github properly adjusts the size for such files in the web-editor).
  • Prevents markdown / text documents from looking ugly (if opened externally with default editor/vim/nano or web-editor in Github). Check out Language specific settings and Language identifier.
• Tab size 2 seems to be the sweet spot (especially for markdown, e.g. nested lists in places like Reddit/Github).
• Existing files needs to be converted manually using Convert Indentation to Tabs via Status Bar (in right bottom corner).

# ~/.config/VSCodium/User/settings.json
"editor.insertSpaces": false,
"editor.tabSize": 2,
"editor.detectIndentation": true,
"editor.autoIndent": "full",
"[markdown][plaintext]": {
    "editor.insertSpaces": true
}

(Answers #22012)

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Happy Coding!