[TxMt] tabs

[Patrick Kelly]

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.
>