On 6/28/07, Jeff Pohlmeyer yetanothergeek@gmail.com wrote:
Nice idea but the problem is that it is still a global option and you need the preferences dialog if you just change it for one file. So I think John's suggestion is better.
To me, this just seems like a waste of a key binding. I almost never use the tab key to "indent by spaces" because I already have Ctrl+I for that.
So I would prefer that [Tab] literally means "Tab" and Ctrl+I (or whatever) means "indent", instead of using two key bindings to basically perform the same task. In other words, a tab is a tab, and an indent is an indent, in my mind they are simply not the same thing.
But as long as we end up with some way to insert tabs in Makefiles, I'll be happy...
I think it's like this:
You get the indent/de-indent feature using Ctrl-I/Shift-Ctrl-I. Also, Ctrl-I/Shift-Ctrl-I works for a single line the way you'd expect, regardless of where the cursor is.
While text editing, to indent forward by inserting stuff (tab or spaces), you hit the handy Tab key. To "indent back", you just hit BackSpace. This is the way everyone expects it to be, and probably won't change.
As an added bit of extra magic, after you've selected text, Geany seems to allow you to use Tab and Shift-Tab as aliases for Ctrl-I and Shift-Ctrl-I. Personally, I'm not crazy about this behaviour because:
1. If I select some text and hit the Tab key, I'd expect the selection to be replaced by a tab (or, for my configuration, 4 spaces). And,
2. Seems more consistent and uniform to have just one usual way to do a given editor function.
---John