On Feb 7, 2008, at 1:01 PM, Gerd Knops wrote:
I take exception to the C syntax gobbling up whitespace at the beginning of a line. It screws up my tab guides, as seen in the example below (before EXCEPTION).
I'll just echo here what Joachim has said… Sometimes matching entire lines is necessary grammar wise. It'd be great if it wasn't but I think that's not really feasible for all cases.
I've also talked with SubtleGradient a lot about this as he wants the same in the main Javascript and CSS grammars. I think it's a bad precident to set because once you start adding it to one official grammar it becomes a standard feature that people will end up wanting elsewhere. Scope wise I think it's tends to be bad because it can easily double or even triple the number of scopes in a document. Of course that probably sounds hollow as I've been responsible for adding tons of scopes… but it still seems bad to add so many just for a single feature.
I don't know where allan's stance is, but my view is that this should be a TextMate level feature, built into the editor and completely separated from the grammars. It would then work everywhere, even when an entire line is matched. If it was tied into the folding perhaps even allow better coloring as you could the entire clock for a color, something like XCode.