Re: Electric indentation sub-optimality and resolution

[Le Wang <l26wang@gmail.com>]

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On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 8:08 PM, Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> wrote:
>
> > I actually really like the behavior of the code I posted.  It has an
> added
> > small bonus.  Normally it does not cleanup pre-existing whitespace.
> When I
> > modify a line with trailing whitespace it does cleanup that one line,
> > something my projects' guidelines allow.
>

If you work on large projects with a mishmash of participants, this feature
is essential.  It's really distracting from the actual work to always have
your diffs show unrelated edits.

That's what ws-butler does.
>

Indeed.

OTOH, your code is ok for adding it to the user's personal .emacs, but
> not for incorporation into Emacs. The code should be made into a minor
> mode or an optional feature of electric-indent-mode. Creating a new
> minor mode makes more sense, IMO.
>

"ws-trim" also takes the post-command-hook approach, and it's a full
minor-mode.  I found this more active whitespace cleanup distracting.  For
example, if I page-up to read some contextual code and page-down, my
indentation is gone if I was on a blank line.


> Anyways, we need to hear the opinion of the author of ws-butler package.
> AFAIK he tried a similar approach to yours and found problems with it.
>

Let's get some historical context by reading this thread:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2003-02/msg00018.html

ws-trim was proposed there, and apparently it didn't go forward.

ws-butler was made as a quick experiment to see if less obtrusive
whitespace management was possible by reusing the highlight-changes-mode
mechanisms.  If, it was to be included in Emacs, maybe the feature should
be rewritten to independent of highlight-changes-mode.  As it stands, one
glaring deficiency is that  you cannot use highlight-changes-mode when
using ws-butler-mode.






-- 
Le

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