VSCode insert tab character manually

Quick-and-dirty solution: Find a tab somewhere else, then copy-paste.

Chances are that you already have a tab character in the file you are editing, but if not you can generate one in another application or text editor.

You can also generate a tab programmatically in a bash shell with the following command (the brackets are optional):

echo -e [\\t]

For your more immediate needs, I have inserted a tab character below...

    There is a tab character between these brackets: [	]

Another approach is to change the tab mode temporarily, as shown here.

<Alt> <Numpad: 0 0 9>

Still works great!

When working on Makefiles, I use Find/Replace using regexes.

Replace ^ (4 spaces - change as appropriate) with \t.

Strange, Visual Studio Code gives you a clue, but you have to hunt for it.

Turn off "Editor: Detect Indentation" which is ON by default.

After which, it will not assume that a tab is 4 spaces.

Of course, all you have to do is select your spaces, and then you will see "ghost dots" in your selection. If you delete those spaces and then type tab, you will now see 1 "ghost right arrow" when you select it which means now you really have a tab character.

All of the previous solutions presented here require one of the following fairly brute-force solutions: a global RegEx replacement of space sequences, a copy-'n-paste of a hard-coded Tab character, or toggling from space- to tab-indentation and (hopefully remembering to change) back again once you're done.

While these are all, obviously, valid solutions, in my case I just need to insert the occasional single Tab character without jumping through hoops or Googling for a \t on the Internet (or, at least, through Stack Overflow).

For my solution, I have remembered that you can override the VSCode and VSCodium user key-bindings to allow the insertion of a hard-coded Tab character.

As a bit of background, the vast majority of my code is space character indented, but every now-and-then I will write a "Here Document" in a Shell script, and then I would like the "EOF" string to be indented to the same level as the text. For this to work, I need to manually insert a one-off \t character, not spaces.

Here is my solution:

Go to "Settings" → "Keyboard Shortcuts" → "Open Keyboard Shortcuts (JSON)" → Click on the right panel, which should be "User > keybindings.json".

Insert (or update) the following JSON:

[
    {
        "key": "ctrl+v tab",
        "command": "type",
        "args": { "text": "\t" },
        "when": "editorTextFocus"
    },
    {   "key": "ctrl+i",
        "command": "type",
        "args": { "text": "\t" },
        "when": "editorTextFocus"
    },
]

This allows you to use either Ctrl-V followed with a Tab or Ctrl-I to insert the Tab character.

You can turn off editor.insertSpaces.