From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Elena Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: Indenting Emacs Lisp only with tabs? Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 07:02:43 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <925ebcbc-b458-41ee-8aa7-bc57b97aa06b@e8g2000yqo.googlegroups.com> References: <01128ee8-a5d2-4cd6-bdb3-4e8067a2b61f@y36g2000yqh.googlegroups.com> <2911e90a-05ec-43d3-b7d7-9aacbed7dbce@x37g2000yqj.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1251989607 907 80.91.229.12 (3 Sep 2009 14:53:27 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 14:53:27 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Sep 03 16:53:20 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([199.232.76.165]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1MjDgV-0005Dg-Fm for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:53:12 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:54273 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1MjDgU-0006Cp-Vh for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:53:11 -0400 Original-Path: news.stanford.edu!usenet.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!e8g2000yqo.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 31 Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.208.92.182 Original-X-Trace: posting.google.com 1251986563 29303 127.0.0.1 (3 Sep 2009 14:02:43 GMT) Original-X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Original-NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 14:02:43 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: e8g2000yqo.googlegroups.com; posting-host=81.208.92.182; posting-account=AFCLjAoAAABJAOf_HjgEEEi3ty-lG5m2 User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-Via: 1.1 sic.int.lisit.it:8080 (squid/2.5.STABLE3) X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090729 Firefox/3.5.2,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Original-Xref: news.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:172662 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:67798 Archived-At: On 3 Set, 12:17, B Smith-Mannschott wrote: > One of the reasons we stick with monospaced fonts in programming is > because we like to play all sorts of clever tricks with vertical > alignment to visually group related things. (These tricks, > incidentally, are also why mixing tabs and spaces causes so much pain > much of the time.) Indeed, what a mode means when it indents a line with N spaces is: move this text under (N+1)th character of previous line. That could be accomplished with proportional fonts, too. Modes use spaces for what they do, not what they mean. That's why I don't think we will anything like elastic tabstops in Emacs in the near future. Too much indenting code depends on this low level assumption. > But, *of course* it requires different habits when laying out code. Of > course, an editor that supports it as well as emacs does mono-spaced > layout would include logic to insert hard tabs at the right places to > produce a pleasing layout, just as emacs inserts spaces to vertically > align the arguments of a mult-line procedure call. I think that could be eased by making tabs (that is: vertical alignment) visible, just as I think modes for makefiles already do (albeit not for alignment purposes). > I think it's a clever idea, and I do think I could learn to take > advantage of what it offers while minimizing the impact of its > downsides, just as I do now when I code in emacs. I agree.