Hey there,
Matthew Brush wrote:
On 2017-09-03 11:05 AM, Little Girl wrote:
Edit --> Preferences --> Files --> Saving files --> Strip trailing spaces and tabs
[SNIP]
If you put your cursor on a blank line and tab over three times and save the file, Geany strips those three tabs out even though they're leading tabs (they're not trailing after anything).
It's by design, though both ways have their pros and cons.
Yep, I had figured that might be the case.
If I remember correctly VisualStudio has a nice (if complicated to implement) solution, it never saved the superfluous whitespaces, but graphically, in the editor it appeared to leave them alone so it didn't cause you to re-indent while editing after a save.
That doesn't sound like it would quite be a solution, either.
What I'd like is for Geany to only strip trailing spaces or tabs from lines that also contain something other than tabs or spaces. Is there any chance that that's what was intended and that it just needs fixing or is it behaving as intended?
It could be made an option, for example as in this this pull request:
That might be nice.
Of course it would take someone to update it and try and get it merged.
Maybe someone will at some point.
Speaking only for myself, I'd never use this option/feature, and so, with my limited time, have never dedicated any towards reviewing and merging it.
Please don't do it on my account. I haven't used it in the past, just messed around with it today, and can continue on as I've been doing.
You could also do as John mentioned and write a little script to do it as you like, and you could even make it a command for "Send Selection to Command" so that you could do <Ctrl>+a, <Ctrl>+1, <Ctrl>+s to strip the whole file while saving, to your preference.
For inspiration, there is a script in Geany's scripts directory called `rstrip-whitespace.py` which could be trivially adapted to do as above.
Thanks. I'll take a look.