Re: tab character

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 8:01 PM, Ludwig, Mark <ludwig.mark@siemens.com> wrote:
>
>     If you just want it to insert a TAB character every time, just map the key to self-insert-command.
>
> Yes I gathered that this is the only way (or  C-q TAB).  Seems fairly low-level for such a basic usage...
>
>     Are you familiar with M-i that runs tab-to-tab-stop?  That might be what you want, too, especially if you want spaces inserted to 'equal' what the TAB character would do on a typewriter, for instance.
>
> I need tab to be entered as tab without any questions or ambiguity (think makefiles?)

emacs already inserts TAB without any question asked in Makefiles.

The creator of make said it was his biggest error ever to have specified
TABs for makefiles!


http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch15s04.html

    No discussion of make(1) would be complete without an
    acknowledgement that it includes one of the worst design botches in
    the history of Unix. The use of tab characters as a required leader
    for command lines associated with a production means that the
    interpretation of a makefile can change drastically on the basis of
    invisible differences in whitespace.


        Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I
        hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to
        learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at
        Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern
        newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I
        had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends,
        and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly,
        is history.

    -- Stuart Feldman 	 


We told you, TABs are evil!

Do not propagate them!


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
A bad day in () is better than a good day in {}.