This is where it helps to have a little emacs foo. spacemacs does not entirely remove that need, ime. In your .spacemacs there's a function dotspacemacs/user-c

This is where it helps to have a little emacs foo. spacemacs does not entirely remove that need, ime. In your .spacemacs there's a function dotspacemacs/user-config. That runs _after_ spacemacs loads and inits all its layers. It's a good place to configure all the various modes in ways that the layer may not have exposed. Regarding indent, I have this kind of thing: ;; tab for indent, me like (define-key prog-mode-map (kbd "<tab>") 'indent-for-tab-command) (setq web-mode-markup-indent-offset 2) (setq web-mode-css-indent-offset 2) (setq web-mode-code-indent-offset 2) (setq css-indent-offset 2) (setq-default js-indent-level 2) but for any given mode, you can find the variables to set, usually involving the word 'offset' and go from there. You can also use the customize feature -- space colon customize. I've really found emacs and spacemacs worth the effort, but there definitely is effort.