[Geany-Devel] Smart tabs

[Thrawn]

Hi, folks.

Dimitar Zhekov wrote:
> Better for what? I use tabs for indentation because with the tab size,
> I can easily control the screen ammount of indentation, depending on
> the font and display. Saving disk space has nothing to do with that,
> I'll have to live very long to write 1GB of source code. :)

Likewise. I like tabs for indentation because 1 indent = 1 character,
and everyone can have different ideas about how big that indent should be.

Lex Trotman wrote:
>2) There has been much discussion on the ML and several actual prototypes
>of improved indentation/alignment schemes that are flexible enough to
>address many languages (even just many C style languages is a hard
>problem).  None of them have been sufficiently correct, enough of the time,
>to overcome the problems of being really annoying when they are incorrect.

Yeah, I've seen a little of that discussion,
and I'm not looking to solve it in 5 minutes :).

>3) But there is no way to tell Geany to not apply indentation per file, so
>Geany will still do its thing independent of the plugin (and that includes
>moving } not just on enter).

Maybe what is needed is not a configuration file per language,
but instead a code snippet per language? But I guess Geany would then
have to rely on the presence of a dynamic language on the system,
or else write it in C and have to rebuild from source to change it :s.

>Splitting a line on user command is certainly an easier way to do it, I
>assume you mean last *unmatched* bracket on the line (that is not in a
>string or comment).  Oh and don't forget C++ uses <> as brackets for
>templates, but don't confuse that with the places it uses them for gt and
>lt :)

Good point. I might actually ignore the angle bracket issue,
unless it's really likely that people will have so many entries in a template
that they'll want to split the line. Otherwise...I guess when it found a <
it could search the rest of the line for a matching > and decide based on that.

>Finally plugins should *not* bind keys by default, they have no way of
>knowing if the user has already bound that key to something else (and of
>course multiple plugins binding the same key :).

Oh, I know, I was just thinking aloud about which keybinding I might use.

> Adding such analysis could be a big job but in my experience Emacs does
> produce a reasonable result.

Yeah, that looks too big for what I was thinking of,
but thanks for pointing it out. I might use it as a reference.

Thomas Martitz wrote:
> Bah, this "everything must be a plugin" really annoys me...
> What's wrong with you accepting new code in the core?

Actually, I agree that custom indentation schemes are too troublesome to include in core...
unless someone, somehow, has a spark of genius allowing them to invent a perfect
one-scheme-fits-all approach. This idea - particularly the Lua script - is far from that.