[9fans] handling tabs in text frames

["Francisco J Ballesteros" <nemo@lsub.org>]

Hi,

I'm considering an alternative to the current tab behaviour in text frames.
I'm tired of adding/removing tabs to keep adt declarations aligned, and I think
the machine should do it, not me. Thus, for a experimental implementation
for text frames I'm playing with now, I plan
to implement tab handling  as follows:

1.
Tabs get a default width, say 4 chars, but their actual width depends
on what is found
on lines of text before and after the tab considered. That is, their
width will grow to
actually tabulate the text shown.
For example, the tabs in
a \t b
c \t d
e \t f \t g
will make three aligned columns, no matter the widths of a ... g.

2.
Tabs right after a new line will be a exception in that why will have
a fixed width and will
not be subject to this rule.

One minor detail is that my aim is to make empty lines boundaries
regarding tabulation,
so that not all the file has to be tabulated according to the same widths.

I'd like to hear what others think regarding this behaviour before
actually implementing
it.

thanks