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By default Emacs uses tab instead of spaces for indentation, so I changed these 2 variables to change this behavior,

  (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)        ;; Disable indent with tabs
  (setq default-tab-width 4)                 ;; Set default indent width

It did change the indent mode from tab to space, but if I press RET, when I am in a programming buffer C++ for example, to enter a new line, I get 2 spaces of indentation instead of 4. How do I set this indentation level to 4 be default globally.

Also when when I am editing a line for example, it auto shift the line back to 2 space of indentation, for some reason, and also re-formats how I wrote the code, for example, I usually write like this,

if (true)
{
    // 4 spaces for indentation.
}

If I try to edit or add something, it pushes the lines back to 2 spaces of indentation and also sometimes re-formats the brackets position,

if (true) {
  // 2 spaces for indentation.
}

I am constantly fighting with this thing, and it gets annoying very quickly sometimes. As far as I know, I did not install any formatting package.

Drew
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apoorv569
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  • I'm guessing this question is a duplicate, but I don't have time to look for it now. Hopefully someone will find it, if so, and then close this as a dup. – Drew Jun 19 '21 at 13:38
  • The "sometimes re-formats the brackets position" issue is not a thing that Emacs does by default (to my knowledge). Although you say "As far as I know, I did not install any formatting package." I can only presume that you have unknowingly done exactly this. It's pretty easy to confirm -- just run emacs -Q and confirm the standard behaviour. Assuming it's your own config, you can use the recursive bisection technique to quickly narrow down which piece of your config is responsible. – phils Nov 16 '21 at 14:14
  • @phils I think the default c-default-style is set to "gnu" which indents the braces, as stated here - EmacsWiki I have now switched to linux style, but I don't see any difference. At this point I am mostly manually editing brace position every time. I like how doom-emacs has the perfect c-style that I prefer, wish they had a package to set it up. – apoorv569 Nov 17 '21 at 22:53
  • Indentation can certainly happen automatically, but the "move a bracket from the start of the current line to end of the previous line" issue is not something that I've ever experienced with Emacs, so regardless of the chosen style I don't think that particular kind of reformatting is standard behaviour. – phils Nov 17 '21 at 23:40
  • If you are still having problems with the indentation levels, though, that's definitely fixable. – phils Nov 17 '21 at 23:41
  • @phils I think you are correct, some other package or settings is changing the brace position automatically when I hit RET. BTW I found the doom-emacs c-style here is the link. Now the question is how do I see what package is causing this. I don't have any package that formats the code. I only have LSP and ccls for c/c++. I do have a lot of other packages as well. Here is my emacs config. – apoorv569 Nov 18 '21 at 05:51
  • Looking at the *Message* buffer I saw these messages when the reformatting happens, LSP :: Applying 3 edits to 'MainFrame.cpp' ... Applying 3 edits to 'MainFrame.cpp' ...done

    I think its LSP that is re formatting the code.

     – apoorv569 Nov 18 '21 at 06:04
  • Should be easy to test that by disabling LSP. Looks like a good lead; hopefully you can figure out from here how to make it behave how you want. – phils Nov 18 '21 at 06:09
  • Ok so I found this issue on emacs-lsp github, looks like I have to set lsp-enable-on-type-formatting to nil and it worked. It no longer formats the code. The doom c-style is kind of working, but not exactly as it does in doom. When I type for example void func() and press RET to go to next line and create {} and my cursor is between the 2 braces i.e {|} and I press RET in doom it automatically create new line, indents 4 spaces and take the closing brace to new line. I want to achieve that same behavior. – apoorv569 Nov 18 '21 at 06:45

1 Answers1

3

There is no global setting for the indentation width. Instead, each mode has it’s own setting. In c-mode it is called c-basic-offset. In js2-mode it is js2-basic-offset. For lisp-mode there are two: lisp-body-indent and lisp-indent-offset.

You’re probably using c-mode for editing your C++ files, so you should customize the c-basic-offset variable. Run M-x customize-variable then enter the variable name that you would like to change.

db48x
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  • I'm using c++-mode to edit C++ files. And the value for c-basic-offset is set to set-from-style. So I just change this to 2 or 4, whatever level of spaces I need? There is no c++-basic-offset it seems like. – apoorv569 Jun 19 '21 at 09:59
  • Oh, right. For c-mode (and therefore for a number of modes derived from it, such as java, awk, csharp, and c++ modes) there is also a more complicated style system that lets you pick where your curly braces go, and other things. You can change the current style by customizing c-default-style; it takes values that are defined in c-style-alist. Use C-h v to look at the help for all of these variables to find out more. – db48x Jun 19 '21 at 10:14
  • I think the indentation problem is fixed now I add custom-set-variables '(c-basic-offset 4)) to my init.el file, and it seems to have fixed it. But the formatting problem is still there. – apoorv569 Jun 19 '21 at 16:07