Elastic tabstops

[Tony Balinski]

Quoting Randy Kramer <rhkramer at gmail.com>:

> On Tuesday 04 July 2006 06:16 am, Thomas Orgis wrote:
> > Am Tue, 4 Jul 2006 09:58:56 +0200
> >
> > schrieb Yann <cactux at gmail.com>:
> > > With this idea of elastic tabs, the editor spots groups of lines with
> > > the same kind of tabs, then align the text across these lines on
> > > columns.
> >
> > I thought tabs _are_ alignment characters that one puts in the file and
> > then, on _display_ a width is chosen.
> >
> > But I think I slowly get the idea, when going away from indendation...
...
> ----< other good stuff snipped >---

Don't leave tabs in plain text or code: this is the path to madness. If you
want fancy layout, write macros. Ages ago I wrote a column (re)formatter
macro. It works out column widths for selected text using separator markers
zou define. It won't reformat on the fly (as suggested in this thread), and
it can be finicky, but I have found that it's enough for my needs, and that
I don't use it very often (and I'm rather fussy about clean text layout).

Tony