On Dec 29, 2004, at 1:15 AM, 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.
I don't use tabs myself for indentation, but that mixture is what you get when you do use tabs and have to line up stuff like parameters in function calls, exception clauses, hash constructors, lists of implemented interface, etc.
In those cases it can happen that the conventional place to align vertically (an open paren for instance) may not be a multiple of the configured tab width. Thus the editor fills the rest with spaces.
-- fxn