GNU Emacs Manual - Just Spaces

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## Tabs vs. Spaces

Emacs normally uses both tabs and spaces to indent lines. If you prefer, all indentation can be made from spaces only. To request this, set `indent-tabs-mode` to `nil`. This is a per-buffer variable; altering the variable affects only the current buffer, but there is a default value which you can change as well. See section Local Variables.

There are also commands to convert tabs to spaces or vice versa, always preserving the columns of all nonblank text. `M-x tabify` scans the region for sequences of spaces, and converts sequences of at least three spaces to tabs if that can be done without changing indentation. `M-x untabify` changes all tabs in the region to appropriate numbers of spaces.

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