Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

CSS tab-size

By  on  

The ridiculous tabs vs. spaces debate within code can get just as heated as the JavaScript semi-colon debate.  I'm a tab guy myself but to each their own...just don't work on a project with me if you aren't.  Anyways, I was quite surprised to find that you can set the tab space number of <pre> element code with CSS's tab-size property!

The CSS

The tab-size property takes an integer value representing the number of spaces a tab represents:

/* 4 spaces per tab */
pre {
	tab-size: 4;
}

/* No indentation */
pre {
	tab-size: 0;
}

As you can see, you could even remove indentation all together.  Not recommended but possible.

I love this property as it's especially useful for code-heavy blogs, though it doesn't have much use outside of that.

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Vertically Centering with Flexbox

    Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be.  We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

  • By
    CSS Tooltips

    We all know that you can make shapes with CSS and a single HTML element, as I've covered in my CSS Triangles and CSS Circles posts.  Triangles and circles are fairly simply though, so as CSS advances, we need to stretch the boundaries...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    Didn’t know about that.
    It’s so basic that I wouldn’t be surprised if that was defined in CSS1.
    But it’s a recent thing it seems, and still vendor prefixed. No sign of support in IE, as Microsoft stubbornly thinks that tabs are as huge as 8 spaces!

  2. Aicke Schulz

    For vendor prefixes and browser support comparison: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/CSS/tab-size

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!