[Geany-Devel] Some comments on b4n regex-indent

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 26/01/2013 03:49, Lex Trotman a écrit :
> Hi Colomban,

Hey,

> Here are some comments on the subject branch.

Thanks.  I'll answer the points here, but note that I have updated a few
things recently, so they may not apply anymore.  See at the bottom of
the mail.

>  Solutions left as an
> exercise for the reader since I don't have any ;)

No no, I told you *you* were supposed to give me the solutions ;)

> C language, which I assume represents all {} languages
> 
> 1. Indents relative to the previous line, that means that (tabs, width=4):
> 
> if(long &&
>    more){
>        blah;
> 
> is wrong, blah is indented too far, and hard to fix because unindent
> remains offset (by the extra indent of "more") until the start of the
> line.  Maybe calculate new indent relative to the previous indent
> level, not the alignment?
> 
> This is the same as current, and just as annoying :)

Yeah.  I think for this we need clever parenthesis matching.  I even
have some hard-coded logic locally, made a long time ago because I found
this annoying, but not yet polished... I probably could make it a plugin
one day -- and it'd give the "plugin for filtypes" idea to a test.

> Can't find the gedit plugin

Neither do I.  @the person who mentioned it: would we have a link?

> , so tried emacs 23.4, it indented
> correctly (including indenting "more") without any help from me, but
> didn't indent at all until the ) after "more" and the ; after "blah"
> which is really disconcerting but understandable.

Yeah that's waht I remembered it did.  But on the matter of correctness,
emacs cheats: it has a mod written in elisp for each language :)

>  I guess it has a
> "brace match" type thing for the () and indents next line by { level
> at ;.
> 
> 2. Can't see brace matching problem?  Maybe define better.

Well, the problem is that since autoindent code is triggered after a
newline, it would have "fixed" what brace matching did.  If brace
matching did the same as the autoindent, of course it's fine, but if it
was actually useful it would have been "undone".

> 3. Typing } anywhere (outside comment) causes a fluctuating indent,
> annoying whilst editing.  Not really sure what is going on here, seems
> very dependent on whats on this and the last line, can't find a
> pattern.

I guess what you see is "normal".  "}" is declared as a "trigger
character" in the configuration, so chat it does it… triggering
autoindent for the current line.  And the algorithm is:

line indent = prev_line_indent + indent_after_prev_line -
unindent_after_prev_line + indent_current_line - unindent_current_line

so since the current line indentation is re-computed using the previous
line indentation as a basis and applying the rules on it, the
indentation may change even if it doesn't match (in which case the
indentation would be the same as the one on the prev line).

Maybe I should add an "only update if a rule for the current line
matched" check?  Not sure if it would go against something...

> 4. probably part of the above:
> 
> if(long &&
>    more){ do; it; }
> 
> removes the alignment of "more" when } is typed.  But as I read the
> unindent regex, it shouldn't work unless the } is only preceded by
> whitespace?

As you guessed, same as 3.

> Python, seems ok, but as I said on IRC, I don't expect it to autoexdent.

Yeah the problem with Python is that we can't guess where a block is
supposed to be closed.  Even unindenting "else:" and "elif .*:" isn't
really possible because you can't know to which level the else was
supposed to apply.  Eg.

def foo():
  if a:
    if b:
      pass
    else:
      pass
  else:
    pass

It'd be possible to get the first "else" correctly (just unindent
current line if it matches "else:" and indent nest after ":"); but it
would try to "fix" the second one the same way which isn't correct.  So
we'll probably forget about Python unindentation.

> Can't see anything new wrong with Ruby, but I don't know much what it needs.

new or wrong?   if should work, apart that it unindents after "end" but
don't indent back.

> You havn't done lisp or haskell yet :D

Have somebody ever told you you was a funny guy? ;)


All this said, I changed a 2 things lately:

1) I made it so a newline only automatically triggers autoindent if the
line has the same indent as the previous one, so hopefully it won't lose
manual or brace matched indent.  Actually I'm not sure we should really
automagically reindent upon newline insertion; but it's convenient in
the way it allows not to have any character triggers, in which case the
indentation is performed on newline only and probably won't ever get
annoying (beside the fact it's annoying for the indent not to be fixed
on the fly).

2) Since now \n don't really trigger auto-indent, I fixed handling of
\n and \r as character triggers, so one can configure the thing to force
reindentation upon newline.


Voila.  testing and clever ideas still welcome :)

Regards,
Colomban