Re: Indenting with 2 spaces

[despen@verizon.net]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> Thanks! That seems like a big limitation of Emacs that there is no way
>> to specify all modes at once.
>
> Yes and no:
> - it's an inconvenience that many aspects of major modes are not
>   sufficiently standardized for there to be a central place where the
>   default can be changed once and for all modes.
> - favorite indentation steps tend to depend on the language because
>   different styles of syntaxes lend themselves more or less well to
>   shallow/deep indentation steps.  Furthermore, most projects impose
>   a particular indentation style (and indentation's basic step is part
>   of it), so it's fairly common to have to use different basic steps in
>   different files, even for the same language, if you work on more than
>   a single project.
> So while I generally agree with you, in the specific case of basic
> indentation step, I don't think it's nearly as bad as you say.

Other issues:

1. Makefiles have a specific indentation and attempts to mess with
it would not work.

Whether there are other languages like that, I don't know.

I use my own BAL mode for mainframe Assembler that wouldn't tolerate
being adjusted.

2. Setting up a wrapper for a couple dozen common modes wouldn't be
all that hard as long as all you were worried about is basic indentation
but indentation rules are more complex than just width and spaces
vs. tabs.