[TxMt] Elastic tabstops

[Allan Odgaard]

On 4/7/2006, at 8:58, Christian Bogen wrote:

> [...] The idea sounds quite interesting IMHO. Any chances to see  
> something like this in a future TextMate release? :)

I got a few personal emails about it and one ticket request :)

Here’s my canned reply:

Indeed it is interesting. I do think there would be too big a  
compatibility problem with actually saving such files, since all  
renderings of the file (cat it in terminal, paste it in an email, on  
the web, etc.) would be wrong -- and it’s not easily fixable, e.g. by  
piping the text through something like expand, which would normally  
fix presenting a file with the wrong tab size.

But the actual editing mode might be useful to have. I’ll need to  
give it some further thoughts.

I have considered expanding the current smart tab behavior so that if  
tab is pressed while at the end of the line (rather than start) it  
would insert enough padding to align with what’s on the line above --  
I am however skeptical about this going to “feel right” instead of  
just getting in the way. But it’s worth doing some prototyping.