I'm trying to get a list hirachy with very little text indent, but apparently that's more difficult than I thought.

the basic idea is

<ul class="menu">
<li>a</li>
<ul class="menu">
<li>b</li>
<ul class="menu">
<li>c</li>
</ul>
</ul>
</ul>

I'm using
[CSS]
ul.menu
{
text-indent: -40px;
}
[/CSS]

Now to the problem: I can't knock the menu back too much, because it will disappear. Furthermore, I want to decrease the next level's indent to a reasonable amount. Right now I have enough indent to fit another menu in that space, but of course I'd like it with an indent of 5px or 10px to the upper level.

I'm pretty sure that there is an option for this, though I couldn't find it so far.

Wow this forum is ridiculously slow O_o

So there are two parameters that are interesting for lists: text-indent and margin

text-indent is pretty self explanairy, it knocks your text back or forth depending on the assigned value.

margin defines the actual indent of the list. If you set the margin to 5px the list hirachy will indent the text exactly 5px per level.

so to get a list with 10px indent simply use
[CSS]
ul
{
margin: 10px;
text-indent: -10px;
}
[/CSS]

The text-indent will move the first level back to normal positioning which might be desired in a menu. If you're okay with an initial indent of 10px you can of course skip that parameter; however, if you don't it will only effect the list as a whole.