"Kai Großjohann" wrote in message news:84fzlzsdj6.fsf@lucy.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de... > "Paul Edwards" writes: > > > "Kai Großjohann" wrote in message news:848yrsgd4s.fsf@lucy.is.informatik.uni-duisburg.de... > >> "Paul Edwards" writes: > >> > >> > It is. The "maybe" means it doesn't always indent. And it > >> > shouldn't, when it is quite obvious the user already has text > >> > on that line, and doesn't need it indented. If they had wanted > >> > it indented, they would have pressed tab, not enter. > >> > >> Huh? I find it really convenient that I can just hit TAB (my binding > >> for indent-relative) at the beginning of a line to increase its > >> indentation. > > > > But that's what I just said. You'd press TAB, not enter. > > TAB is logical, enter is not. No-one expects enter, at > > the beginning of a line, to go to a newline and indent > > the existing text. enter doesn't do that sort of thing. It > > does start a newline, beginning under the previous one > > though. That is logical and reasonable. > > But the fact that RET does newline and then does like TAB is your own > customization! So you can't blame Emacs that it is doing what you > told it to do. Well in that case I am blaming emacs for not coming with a "logical indentation mode", e.g. (indent-text-properly 1) which is preferably enabled by default. I didn't specifically want RET bound to newline-and-strange-indent, what I wanted was logical indentation. > That said, I understand that the behavior of RET that you see in > text-mode is not the best behavior. Clearly it should be changed. Thanks for agreeing! What's more surprising is that 10% of the user base didn't report this 10 years ago, and thus was fixed years before I they installed 20.7.1 on this box. > >> > Indentation is meant to apply to a NEW line, not an existing > >> > line. It's meant to put blanks there ready for you to optionally > >> > start typing real characters, and then delete them later if they > >> > are not already there. > >> > >> I use it for existing lines, too. > > > > You don't hit enter at the beginning of a line of text, and expect > > it to insert a newline and indent the current text. > > Actually, I've never minded until now. > > But I see how it would be strange in text mode. But in text mode, > indentation is not done very often. I have told Emacs that RET > invokes newline-and-indent in programming modes (C, Java, Perl, ...) > whereas it does just newline in other modes, like text. I am mostly using text mode to write C code. I expect text mode to allow me to hop in and start changing C code, regardless of the existing style of the C code. > [time passes] > > Oh, now I remember that I sent a bug report about newline-and-indent > in text mode, some years back. Whee. Yeah. I guess Emacs just > doesn't like you to use newline-and-indent in text-like modes :-) Is there any mode I can switch too, where I can get the behaviour I want, without it making a whole set of new problems for me (e.g. automatic assumptions about C coding style). The only assumption I want is that it is indented text, so if the previous line started in column 16, then the cursor should be positioned there when I start a new line. > FWIW, I get by with just newline quite nicely. For the kind of text > I write, indentation is not often required. Remember that doctor's and dentist's appointment? I really do have that stuff, in a big file called "notes.txt" and that is how I indent too. But more importantly I need it for my C code. > >> > It is not meant to trash existing lines! Nor is it meant to get > >> > so confused on the first line, that it just indents 8 spaces, even > >> > when my tab setting is 4, and there's not even a prior line to > >> > inspire it to do something that silly. > >> > >> That might be a misconfiguration on your part. (Not that I blame you; > >> the subject is complex.) indent-relative looks at tab-stop-list and > >> configuring tab-width is not going to have the effect you might > >> expect. (tab-width refers to how tab characters in the text are > >> displayed, but the TAB key does not always insert tab characters.) > > > > So it sometimes (ie at beginning of file) looks at tab-stop-list, > > and everywhere else it looks at the indentation of the previous > > line. Seems very strange to me. > > Hm. I was going to answer that indent-relative does that, but in > fact indent-relative-maybe also has this strange behavior in the > first line of the file. I think that might be a bug. Ok. > Note that indent-relative goes by tab-stop-list after the end of the > previous line, whereas indent-relative-maybe does not do that. Ok. Hopefully with your latest lisp stuff I will finally get the basic editting that I am after. BFN. Paul.