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Re: Indenting Emacs Lisp only with tabs?


From: B Smith-Mannschott
Subject: Re: Indenting Emacs Lisp only with tabs?
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 14:17:56 +0200

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 10:11, Joost Kremers<joostkremers@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Elena wrote:
>> For a glimpse of indentation with pixel precision, look here (Java
>> plugin required):
>>
>> http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
>
> huh? when i remove or insert a TAB, the text is jumping all over the place! 
> how
> could anyone *want* this?

Of course it works differently than you are used to! That doesn't
automatically make it unusable.

One of the reasons we stick with monospaced fonts in programming is
because we like to play all sorts of clever tricks with vertical
alignment to visually group related things. (These tricks,
incidentally, are also why mixing tabs and spaces causes so much pain
much of the time.)

What's interesting about the elastic tab stops proposal is that it
allows for arbitrary fonts without killing the ability to communicate
by aligning related things vertically.

But, *of course* it requires different habits when laying out code. Of
course, an editor that supports it as well as emacs does mono-spaced
layout would include logic to insert hard tabs at the right places to
produce a pleasing layout, just as emacs inserts spaces to vertically
align the arguments of a mult-line procedure call.

I think it's a clever idea, and I do think I could learn to take
advantage of what it offers while minimizing the impact of its
downsides, just as I do now when I code in emacs.

// Ben




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