[Geany-Devel] Some Auto-Indentation Ideas

[Braden Walters]

As a reply to everyone:

I now see what Thomas Martitz wrote, and I'm surprised I overlooked the 
newline strip whitespace option. This will help me out a bit, but I also 
understand Roger Booth's comments about indentation in virtual space. 
Although, in the code I work with at least, it's rare that I would 
notice a difference between the existing newline strip option and that, 
but I definitely think it'd be useful. If you do decide to make that a 
plugin, I'd be glad to help.

To Lex Trotman's "rant", I have to say I totally agree but also sort of 
disagree. Doing auto-indentation by using the full language grammar is 
definitely good to have, but it presents some problems. In every IDE 
I've used that does this, it allows you to configure it to some degree 
to work with the way you format your code, but any deviation from the 
norm becomes a total headache. I've always liked that Geany gives me 
lots of auto-complete options, but if I so desire, I can strip those 
options down to "only insert exactly what I type". In my opinion, 
keeping multiple auto-indentation styles would be better. The 
basic/current char methods are nice because they're very simple but 
provide some form of auto-indentation, but I agree that perfecting a 
more "complete" auto-indentation (or even auto-formating in general) 
system is important.

I'm going to think about all of this a bit more, and if I have any other 
comments or questions, I'll send another e-mail I suppose. Thanks for 
the replies!

-- 
Sincerely,
Braden Walters