- Qt Creator Manual
- Indent text or code
- Qt Creator Manual 13.0.0

How To

# Indent text or code

When you type text or code, it is indented automatically according to the selected text editor or code style preferences. Select a block to indent it when you press Tab. Press Shift+Tab to decrease the indentation. You can disable automatic indentation.

To fix the indentation in the file currently open in the editor, select options in the Edit > Advanced menu or use keyboard shortcuts:

- To automatically indent the highlighted text, select Auto-indent Selection or press Ctrl+I.
- To automatically format the highlighted text, select Auto-format Selection or press Ctrl+;.
- To adjust the wrapping of the selected paragraph, select Rewrap Paragraph or press Ctrl+E followed by R.
- To toggle text wrapping, select Enable Text Wrapping or press Ctrl+E followed by Ctrl+W.
- To visualize whitespace in the editor, select Visualize Whitespace or press Ctrl+E followed by Ctrl+V.
- To clear all whitespace characters from the currently open file, select Clean Whitespace.

## Automatically fix indentation

To automatically fix indentation according to the indentation settings when you save the file, select Preferences > Text Editor > Behavior > Clean whitespace > Clean indentation. Select the Skip clean whitespace for file types check box to exclude the specified file types.

## Show whitespace in editor

To visualize whitespace in the editor, select Preferences > Text Editor > Display > Visualize whitespace.

To visualize indentation, select Visualize Indent. To adjust the color of the visualization, change the value of the Visual Whitespace setting of the editor color scheme in Font & Colors.

## Display right margin

To help you keep line length at a particular number of characters, set the number of characters in the Display right margin at column field. To use a different color for the margin area, select the Tint whole margin area check box. Deselect the check box to show the margin as a vertical line.

To use a context-specific margin when available, select the Use context-specific margin check box. Then, use the ClangFormat `ColumnLimit` option to set the margin, for example.

See also C++ Code Style, Behavior, Qt Quick Code Style, and Keyboard Shortcuts.