Re: Spaces rather than tabs by a major mode hook

[goncholden]

------- Original Message -------
On Saturday, June 11th, 2022 at 10:10 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:


> > Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2022 08:57:54 +0000
> > From: goncholden goncholden@protonmail.com
> > Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> >
> > Ok. But it seemed to me that for fortran I am limited on what I can do,
> > where the original developers did not.
>
>
> No, you aren't limited, it's the other way around: you have the Emacs
> power at your fingertips, while they used some simpler editor that
> placed the burden of indentation on the user.

Correct, the editor placed the burden of adding tabs on the user.

> > For instance, how can I get the tab key to just make a tab and
> > pressing it again to make another tab. As I can do with spaces.
>
>
> You shouldn't need this, not at all. If you set the indentation
> levels and variables for the style of these files, typing TAB will
> insert as many TAB characters as needed to get to the correct column.
> For example, if the line should be indented 3 tab stops, typing TAB
> just once will insert all the 3 TABs in one go.
>
> That is what Emacs indentation commands are about: they insert the
> whitespace as necessary according to your settings, so that you never
> again should need to count TABs or insert them one by one.
>
> You should embrace this powerful feature instead of fighting against
> it. It does need some setup to adapt to a particular style of
> indentation, but that is one-time only, so really worth it.

The point here is that they do not have a specific style, meaning the styles 
vary, but emacs imposes some specific style that one has to set up.  And you 
cannot degress from it.