I just ran across this issue on SuperUser (http://superuser.com/questions/641878/sublime-text-3-html-auto-indent-issue) and figured out a workaround, but I figured I’d post it here as well.

In HTML mode, open up a tag like a div, hit enter twice, close the div, then go back up a line and hit Tab to start entering another tag, like so (the | is the cursor):

<div class="someClass">
    |
</div>

As soon as you type a character (it can be any character, not just a < for opening a new tag), the indenting slides to the left and whatever you’re typing is now aligned with the

<div class="someClass">
<|
</div>

<div class="someClass">|</div>

<div class="someClass">
    |
</div>

This is really annoying and also occurs when creating tags with the XML/long-tag snippet.

+1

+1

It’s 2016 and this still exists.

I’ve gone bare bones - no plugins installed. If your content type is set to PHP (which it WILL be in an HTML document that uses PHP) it causes it.

Absolutely fed up with this.

I’ve narrowed this down to being caused by the batchIncreaseIndentPattern in the Packages/HTML/Miscellaneous.tmPreferences file. Commenting it out prevents it from unindenting when typing the < character. No idea why, seeing as it is an indent pattern and not an unindent pattern…

In particular, it is the first alternation that is causing it:

^\s*
<(?!\?|area|base|br|col|frame|hr|html|img|input|link|meta|param|[^>]*/>)
  ([A-Za-z0-9-]+)(?=\s|>)\b[^>]*>(?!.*</\1>)
|

removing that stops it unindenting when typing <

Which version of ST3 did you get this from? This is from Build 3117:

<key>batchDecreaseIndentPattern</key>
<string>(?x)
^\s*
(&lt;/(?!html)
  [A-Za-z0-9-]+\b[^&gt;]*&gt;
|--&gt;
|&lt;\?(php)?\s+(else(if)?|end(if|for(each)?|while))
|\}
)
</string>

3117. It’s the batchIncreaseIndentPattern - with emphasis on the increase, which is the odd thing.

Whoops, didn’t read closely enough. So, if I understand you correctly, taking this:

<(?!\?|area|...

and changing it to this

<(?!area|...

should do the trick?

sorry for not being clear. I’m saying, taking this:

<key>batchIncreaseIndentPattern</key>
<string>(?x)
    ^\s*
    &lt;(?!\?|area|base|br|col|frame|hr|html|img|input|link|meta|param|[^&gt;]*/&gt;)
      ([A-Za-z0-9-]+)(?=\s|&gt;)\b[^&gt;]*&gt;(?!.*&lt;/\1&gt;)
    |&lt;!--(?!.*--&gt;)
    |&lt;\?php.+?\b(if|else(?:if)?|for(?:each)?|while)\b.*:(?!.*end\1)
    |\{[^}"']*$
</string>

and changing it to this, should do the trick:

<key>batchIncreaseIndentPattern</key>
<string>(?x)
    &lt;!--(?!.*--&gt;)
    |&lt;\?php.+?\b(if|else(?:if)?|for(?:each)?|while)\b.*:(?!.*end\1)
    |\{[^}"']*$
</string>

of course it may (should?) affect selecting an entire document and using the reindent command in perhaps undesired ways…

It is now 2017 and this issue still hasn’t been fixed. Is the developer even aware this is an issue that NEEDS to be fixed? It is currently my number 1 annoyance.

yep, the ST devs have taken a look and have a fix in mind:

writing HTML in ST build 3128 no longer causes the caret to move back an indentation level unexpectedly