Elastic tabstops

[Thomas Orgis]

OK, I know it's a holy war that will never end and continue to be fought
in projects as long as we edit programs in plain text (with, strictly
speaking, mixture of data and representation).
Therefore, a text editor should support all of the ways and nedit mostly
does (I still have to disable some smartness in the indent macro coming
from emulating tabs so that it works better for me;-).

I think one root of the problem that it is difficult for people to do
the same thing with respect to tabs/spaces is that different things are
happening when pressing the tab key.
You press the tab key and always something happens, most of the times
something suggesting that you just "inserted a tab".
But depending on your editor setting (that you may not be aware of)
there could have been spaces or a tab been inserted into the file.
You see the difference when you try to remove the "tabs" ... at least in
nedit the emulated ones sooner or later show their true nature.
When there would be more distinct ways to issue either tab insertion or
tab-like space insertion, people would realize that they actually do
different things.
But with the magic tab key as it is handled today, the confusion and
unawareness will probably never end.
(Of course, nedit's backlighting helps as it actually shows the ugly
mixtures of tabs and spaces with an unpleasant color mix.)

Well, I don't see this debate coming to a fruitful end just now (or in
the next hundret years;-).

Thank you all for helping me understand what this holy war really is
about.

I do know now what emulated tabs actually are and I will continue to not
using them (I still press space to get spaces and tab to get tabs).
I understand that you will do it as you've learned to do in a (long)
programmer's life, while I'll play the rebel with my mere 10 years of
coding of some sort (hm, I don't really remember how I handled
indendation in TurboPascal...).

I'll comment a bit on Tim's mail now, but for the sake of keeping flames
down, I will try to stay quiet on any final notice by someone else
unless there is a too obviously challenging statement in there...

Am Mon, 17 Jul 2006 03:15:33 -0700
schrieb Tim Hubberstey <timh at marmot-eng.com>: 

> It is important to realize that the tab character was used as a 
> substitute for spaces primarily because it consumed less precious 
> storage and bandwidth, not because it was better. Now, with disk space


Well, many things are not used according to their initial intention...
and for tabs one can indeed claim that their initial meaning (for
typewriters and word processors) is along the elastic tabs proposal.
I'm not that interested in why people started using tabs in code some
time ago - I see the benefit of a cheap possibility to give each
developer the indent width he/she/it wants without chaning the file.
Again - I only mean the indent of the beginning of a line, no column
formatting of stuff.


> [...]
> In my opinion, there are more important issues facing NEdit than 
> something like this.

Hm, like supporting Unicode files, perhaps? Oh, and I just again
realized that I don't like the file dialog at all... all I really need
is a line to say the filename with keyboard helped by tab-completition.
Sure, there is stuff;-)
But that's no reason to dump the elastic tab feature (from which the
current debate departed a bit...).


Well then,

Thomas.