On Jan 31, 2007, at 9:51 AM, Rob McBroom wrote:

On Jan 31, 2007, at 12:50 AM, Garance A Drosehn wrote:

...

What I want is my tab-intent to be a soft-tab (using blanks) at 4 spaces, but I also want hard-tabs (using the actual tab character) to be used for 8 spaces. So, if I tab once I want four spaces, if I tab twice then I want a single tab character, and with three tabs I want a tab-character followed by four spaces.

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you can have TextMate do this for you just by altering settings.

You could probably create a command that goes through your document and replaces 8 spaces with a tab character. To get even fancier, you could probably create a command that does this and saves the document and bind this command to ⌘S, so when you save the file, it gets formatted the way you want.

I'm not sure if TextMate will let you use Tab as a key equivalent for a command, but if so, you could make it even more automated (probably what you want) by having it do a search/replace on the current line every time you hit the Tab key. This might screw up the cursor position though.

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Rob McBroom http://www.skurfer.com/ I didn't "switch" to Apple... my OS did.

Ya. It's Tabs or spaces. no mixing. Don't bother trying to write a tmCommand for this since you'd break snippet placer stuff and open up a whole can of trouble and pain for yourself. I recommend using tabs at 4 and just using two of them in some places.

If you already have documents that assume 4spaces + 8wide tabs, you can switch to using all tbs by setting it to use 8wide soft tabs (spaces), use the convert tabs to spaces action o convert all your 8 wide tabs to 8spaces, then switch to hard tabs at 4width and convert spaces to tabs.

thomas Aylott — design42 — subtleGradient — CrazyEgg

On Jan 31, 2007, at 10:15 AM, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

Actually what would probably work is setting tab as a "tab trigger". Then the command will only be triggered if it is preceded by a tab (and will swallow that tab).

Ok, here are some more details on it. I've actually attached the two commands that would do this, so you can use those as they are, or you can reproduce them as follows. Set the tab setting to soft tabs: 4. Create a new command, with tab trigger set to four spaces, and with command text:

echo -n " "

So that's echo -n followed by a tab in quotes. Set the input to none, and the output to Insert As Text.

Create a second command, with tab trigger a tab character (you would need to copy and paste the character in there to get it there), input none and output insert as text, and with command text:

echo -n " "

So in the quotes there are now a tab followed by four spaces.

This should give you the desired behavior without compromising the tab triggers. Just make sure you set the above two commands to use a tab trigger, not a key equivalent.

Haris

Haris