What indent unit should I use for code?

Two or four spaces are the most common conventions in most style guides, though a literal tab character also works if that's what your project expects.

Does it affect blank lines?

Yes, the indent unit is prepended to every line including blank ones, since the tool doesn't try to guess which lines are 'real' content.

How is this different from the unindent tool?

This tool adds indentation; the companion Text Dedenter tool removes it. Use them together to shift a block in either direction.

Text Indenter Online - Add Spaces or Tabs to Every Line

Overview

Introduction

Nesting a block of code, quoting a paragraph, or formatting a list often means adding the same prefix to every single line.

Doing that by hand in a text editor, line by line, is tedious for anything longer than a few lines.

What Is Text Indenter?

An indenter that prepends a chosen indent unit, repeated a chosen number of times, to the start of every line in a block of text.

It runs entirely client-side as part of this site's String Tools collection, so nothing you paste is ever uploaded to a server.

How Text Indenter Works

The tool builds a prefix by repeating the indent unit the given number of levels, splits the input on newlines, prepends the prefix to each line, and rejoins them.

The transformation happens synchronously in JavaScript the moment you type, with no network round trip involved.

When To Use Text Indenter

Use it to nest a block of code inside another block, quote a paragraph with a leading marker, or indent a list for a markdown document.

It's a fast way to get the answer without opening a code editor, a REPL, or writing a one-off script just to check.

Often used alongside Text Dedenter, Left Aligner and Word Wrapper.

Features

Advantages

Works with any indent unit, spaces, tabs, or a custom marker like '> '.
Supports multiple indent levels in one pass.

Limitations

Applies the same indent to every line uniformly; it can't detect and preserve existing relative indentation structure.

Examples

Indenting with two spaces

Input

line one
line two

Output

  line one
  line two

With levels=1 and indent unit ' ' (two spaces), each line gets one copy of the indent unit prepended.

Best Practices & Notes

Best Practices

Use '> ' as the indent unit to quickly quote a paragraph in markdown or email-style plain text.

Developer Notes

The prefix is computed once as `indentUnit.repeat(levels)` and then prepended to each line from `input.split("\n")`, so the repetition cost is paid once rather than per line.

Text Indenter Use Cases

Nesting a code snippet one level deeper before pasting it into a larger file
Quoting a paragraph of email or chat text with a leading marker
Indenting a list block for a markdown document

Common Mistakes

Mixing tabs and spaces as the indent unit across separate passes, which can produce inconsistent-looking indentation in an editor.

Tips

Set levels higher than 1 to indent multiple nesting depths in a single pass instead of running the tool repeatedly.

Text Indenter