[Nano-devel] okay to change the behavior of indent/unindent?

[Benno Schulenberg]

Op  9-07-2017 om 04:30 schreef David Ramsey:
> After studying the indent/unindent code and looking at bug #47684,

See https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?47684.
Also see https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?51408.

> * The behavior of indent/unindent should be more consistent.

To clarify: currently, with the default settings, when indenting,
nano will insert a tab /after/ the leading whitespace of a line,
meaning that the text will move to the next "tab stop": the next
multiple of eight.  When --tabstospaces is used, however, nano
will simply insert eight spaces after the leading whitespace,
meaning that the text moves a full eight positions further.

Those two behaviors are inconsistent.  And that is why we concluded
in the above two bugs that nano should add the tabs or spaces to the
/beginning/ of each affected line, so that the text will always move
the same amount, no matter whether --tabstospaces is used, nor whether
there is any number of leading spaces that is less than a full tab's
worth (which means that it will preserve any partial indents).

Anyone who disagrees with this change in behavior?

> Indenting will add tabs to the beginnings of the lines it affects (or full tabs' 
> worth of spaces if the --tabstospaces option is used).  Unindenting will remove
> tabs from the beginnings of the lines it affects (if the lines begin with tabs;
> it will remove them whether they consist of actual tabs or full tabs' worth of
> spaces).

Meaning that also unindent will preserve partial indents, something
that it currently /seems/ to do, but doesn't do when you first do an
indent.  This means that currently you can normalize the indentation
of a piece of text, by selecting it, indenting it and unindenting it.
Any difference in indentation that is less than a tab's width will
be gone.  With the new behavior this normalization "feature" will
no longer work: any difference in indentation will be preserved.

(I haven't yet looked at the patch set, nor tested it.  I'm a bit
low on time these days.)

Benno