I would prefer to not have an editor which modify completely the file I am working on (ie. automatically replace tab by spaces). When working on big project, you cannot assume that everybody use spaces-based editor, and you still want to minimize the diff size of your patches.

Thomas

2008/10/23 Romain Bardou <Romain.Bardou@lri.fr>
That's actually nearly what Camelia has right now. Right now Camelia
insists on not dealing with tabs at all -- it converts them all to
spaces. This "feature" has to go obviously, and it's a few-liner to
convert between characters (which include tabs) and columns.

What do you mean with this? Reason I ask is that in OcalIDE an option to
save files with spaces only, was added because it allows one to simultaneously edit files in various editors, each with its own tab
"length". If not, indenting is not maintained. I myself think that
avoiding tabs altogether is a good solution.

I agree.

Even without changing your editor, you can change the tab length.

Moreover, if the editor uses tabs and counts them as more than one character (default behavior of emacs) it won't be able to locate errors correctly.

Finally, when you use backspace to delete one space and suddenly it deletes eight of them because it was actually a tab, it's annoying because it's unpredictable.

Altogether, this means that if you edit a file and put tabs in it, it may work for you, but it may annoy the people you give your file to :p

--
Romain Bardou


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