I had some ideas for some keybindings or settings that could help with some indentation issues. I'm willing to implement them myself, but I wanted to see what the other developers think first. First, the reason why I want to even write these.
I work on multiple projects, some of which have multiple developers and some where whitespace has been left all around some files. I generally use manual indentation (no auto-indent at all), and I can't help but think there's something better I could do. I could use the current character indent, but then I'll have trailing whitespace everywhere, or I'll have to backspace that out manually (sort of defeats the purpose). I could turn on "Strip trailing whitespace", but that's going to modify a lot of lines I never really changed.
Here are some solutions I've thought up: - Keybindings for everything approach: Improve the "smart indent" key binding to just use the global (or project if available) settings for auto-indentation upon striking the key combination. Then, create a key binding that removes all contents from a line, but does not delete the line itself. - Strip on return approach: Create a global/project settings option to strip whitespace from the current line upon striking return.
Both of these approaches introduce a problem though. If I remove whitespace from a line, I return back to a column position of zero. The auto-indent modes I've used will therefore make the following line 0 columns indented. One solution to this could be to auto-indent up to the last indented line, if available. I'm sure there are other solutions to this though.
So I propose three questions in this email. First: Is this something I should even be making for an upstream core feature, or should it be in a plugin? Second: Which of my two approaches seems more reasonable? Third: Are there any other solutions anyone has to the final problem I mentioned, or will the solution I proposed suffice?
Sorry for the length of this e-mail, everyone.