[Geany-devel] Indentation using regex (was [PATCH 14/19] Rewrite tab switching queue)

[Lex Trotman]

[...]
> Maybe I don't understand it correctly but does this mean that if you
> open an existing file, you'd re-indent it completely based on the
> regexes? I don't think this is a good idea because this could lead to
> whitespace change in every line when you edit just a single line.
>

No, thats another reason why I rejected option 1

> Or does it mean to have these indent numbers just internally and use
> them only when when auto-indentation is done? I often work with files
> edited by many people over many years which have inconsistent indents.
> Imagine the correct indent size is 4 but someone used just 2 indents
> in the outer "if" block. If I insert new "if" inside this block, the
> indent size will be 6 because of the incorrect outer indent. This is
> exactly why I used the "delta" indent solution to be locally correct
> and have minimal impact on (and be minimally affected by) the rest of
> the code.

The algorithm will give 6 since it only considers the previous line
and the line it is indenting which is the line with the cursor.


>
> One more thing - with global indents you have to be sure that the
> regexes catch all the indentation cases (without false positives)
> otherwise one error will affect the indentation everywhere in the rest
> of the file. You can do crazy stuff with some languages so I can
> imagine such a thing can happen easily (single line with end of
> multi-line comment followed by end block followed by another comment).
> With delta indentation it's much less critical - the indent may be
> incorrect for the next line but this won't affect the rest of the file
> in any negative way. Moreover, you usually don't do things like the
> comment example when you write the code and when you need
> auto-indentation; you usually add them afterwards when no
> autoindentation is needed.
>
> Final remark - better not to auto-indent at all than to indent
> incorrectly. There's nothing worse than an editor (actually anything)
> which tries to be smart in an annoying way.

Don't worry there is no intention that auto-indentation does more than
give a mostly right indent on new lines and mostly correct it when you
type } on that new line.

I did clearly say it should not change any manual indentation.


Cheers
Lex