Madness or not I work in an environment where everybody uses emacs and that's the way it behaves. Even if there is an option to "fix" emacs, I doubt I'll convince everybody else to switch to accommodate my perverse use of some obscure editor. Especially since this seems like the correct behavior for everybody using emacs.
Personally I believe that emacs got it right, that tab widths should always be at 8, and editors should indent intelligently with spaces as needed. (Actually it's kind of a bummer that tab characters go into text files at all, ever. Just like the whole confusion over what is a line (cr, crnl, nl).)
Like I said, it may be possible for me to rid the files I edit of all tabs by using the expand unix utility. The problem with that is causing large, meaningless diffs when I checkin my changes to CVS.
Do menu selection changes get recorded in macros? How can I automate switching between 4 and 8 tab widths?
On Dec 28, 2004, at 4:15 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
On 27.12.2004, at 21:05, Patrick Kelly wrote:
I'd like to be able to set my "indentation level" to 4 and leave the tab stops at 8. That is, if I hit my tab key the cursor should move as if my tabs stops are set at 4 (any any spaces required should be added). If there are any actual tab characters in the file, the file should display as if I had selected 8 as my tab size. (Basically this is because I edit files that other people have edited using emacs which "intelligently" uses tabs where it can to fill in sequences of 8 spaces.)
One uses tabs *or* spaces to indent, not some mixture of the two -- that's madness. People speak so highly of emacs; it can't possibly force this behavior. It must be possible to tell it not to do that. And I don't see any need for TextMate to provide workarounds for other people's broken editor configurations. Adding a feature to TextMate to deal with this lunacy just makes for more-confusing preferences and application bloat for I would hope the majority of users whose coworkers have their editors set up reasonably.