unobstrusive way to show indentation

unobstrusive way to show indentation

[Le Wang]

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Hi,

How difficult would it be to implement some way to show indentation levels
in an unobstrusive way?  Sublime text and other modern editors do this by
drawing a thin vertical line down from (back-to-indentation).  I find it
really helpful when reading code.  This stackoverflow question clarifies
what I'm after, although I didn't ask it.  I find this really helpful when
reading a piece of code with many block levels, especially since the
standard indentation level for ruby is 2 spaces.

I guess it can be faked by changing the face of that column, but that would
be more obstrusive than a thin line.  Maybe there is another solution I
haven't thought of?

-- 
Le

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Re: unobstrusive way to show indentation

[Le Wang]

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Oops.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8836336/sublime-text-2-like-block-highlighting-in-emacs

On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 12:10 AM, Le Wang <l26wang@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> How difficult would it be to implement some way to show indentation levels
> in an unobstrusive way?  Sublime text and other modern editors do this by
> drawing a thin vertical line down from (back-to-indentation).  I find it
> really helpful when reading code.  This stackoverflow question clarifies
> what I'm after, although I didn't ask it.  I find this really helpful when
> reading a piece of code with many block levels, especially since the
> standard indentation level for ruby is 2 spaces.
>
> I guess it can be faked by changing the face of that column, but that
> would be more obstrusive than a thin line.  Maybe there is another solution
> I haven't thought of?
>
> --
> Le
>



-- 
Le

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RE: unobstrusive way to show indentation

[Drew Adams]

> How difficult would it be to implement some way to show
> indentation levels in an unobstrusive way?  Sublime text
> and other modern editors do this by drawing a thin
> vertical line down from (back-to-indentation).  I find it
> really helpful when reading code.  This stackoverflow
> question clarifies what I'm after, although I didn't ask it.
> I find this really helpful when reading a piece of code
> with many block levels, especially since the standard
> indentation level for ruby is 2 spaces.
>		
> I guess it can be faked by changing the face of that column,
> but that would be more obstrusive than a thin line.  Maybe
> there is another solution I haven't thought of? 
>
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8836336/sublime-text-2-like-block-highlightin
g-in-emacs

It's not quite the same thing, but you get a similar benefit from the features
mentioned here:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HighlightCurrentColumn
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/VlineMode

Vline can use a thin line (or a face). Column-marker highlighting stays put
(doesn't move with the cursor), and you can highlight any number of columns, but
it uses a face, not a thin line.

RE: unobstrusive way to show indentation

[Tim Connors]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2012, Drew Adams wrote:

> > How difficult would it be to implement some way to show
> > indentation levels in an unobstrusive way?  Sublime text
> > and other modern editors do this by drawing a thin
> > vertical line down from (back-to-indentation).  I find it
> > really helpful when reading code.  This stackoverflow
> > question clarifies what I'm after, although I didn't ask it.
> > I find this really helpful when reading a piece of code
> > with many block levels, especially since the standard
> > indentation level for ruby is 2 spaces.
...
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8836336/sublime-text-2-like-block-highlightin
> g-in-emacs
...
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/HighlightCurrentColumn
> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/VlineMode
...

Thanks.  Found vline a bit slow though - slowed down cursor movement a lot
despite adjusting timer values (which seemed to be ignored - but maybe I
was meant to touch them before initialising the library).  But
col-highlight is neat enough.

Looks like sublime does it quite nicely.  I wonder if someone with more
elisp-fu than myself wants to go ahead and try to reproduce it :)

-- 
Tim Connors

unobstrusive way to show indentation

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Le Wang writes:

 > I guess it can be faked by changing the face of that column, but that would
 > be more obstrusive than a thin line.

In XEmacs you can use a background pixmap; make the pixmap a thin line
and there you go.  ISTR Emacs supports background pixmaps too, so this
should be possible, but I can't help you with the code since the APIs
are rather different.