On 03/13/2013 09:42 PM, Braden Walters wrote:
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.
I've worked as a developer in teams of programmers. I've never seen examples of "where whitespace has been left all around some files". Occasionally I see spaces at the end of lines. That doesn't bother me much.
My main whitespace complaint with Geany is the indentation whitespace auto-generated when I leave blank lines. So if I am at one tab indentation and I type return, return, the line above the caret contains one tab only.
The editor I used when I developed on Windows, Codewright, allowed moving the caret into virtual space, as does Geany. But when I hit return, Codewright put the caret in virtual space on the new line. Only when I typed a character did Codewright fill in the virtual space from bol using my chosen indentation policy. So if I am at one tab indentation and I type return, return, the line above the caret is completely empty. The drawback is that the caret is at the left margin, since the previous line's indentation was zero. But I found that preferable to Geany's. I always felt Codewright's behavior could have been improved to eliminate even this imperfection.
I did play around with Geany's various white-space removal options. But when submitting patches I was worried that the group to whom I submitted the patch might object to gratuitous changes. Also, I tend to save often, and each time I would save, the caret would snap back one and the space I typed after the last token would be lost. Irritating.
I vote for Codewright's approach, with or without the improvement.
Roger
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.