I like tabs to be displayed narrower than 8 spaces. Sometimes I cat or print files to stdout on a console. I thought setting terminal tab width would be pretty straightforward but I must be going about it the wrong way. I'm running SuSE 9.1 on an Athlon.
man tabs looked promising. However, although the documentation appears to have been installed by default, the command wasn't. I looked at stty, setterm, and tput. setterm's -regtabs option looked right. However, setterm -regtabs 4 has no effect, despite the fact that there is no error message and the return code indicates no error. Maybe tput will help tput it 8 tput it 4 8 except nothing happens.
Any suggestions on how to set the tab width? Ideally, I would like this to be command-based instead of termcap-based so it can easily be user-specific and machine independent. Thanks a lot! -Robert Dick-