Indentation preferences

rphodges wrote on Mon Jul 30 04:13:21 MEST 2007:

The layout of the Perl Editor Preferences pane confuses me.

My current settings are:

Displayed Tab Width: 8
Insert tabs/spaces on indent: 4
Use spaces instead of tabs: unchecked

From a user interface perspective it is not really clear to me what "Insert
tabs/spaces ..." really means and how
it might be impacted by the "Use spaces instead of tabs" checkbox.  The
wording of the above settings implies that 4 tabs would be inserted for
every indent.   It also implies that if "Uses spaces instead of tabs" is
checked, then 4 spaces would be inserted for every indent. 

 However, it appears that when "Use spaces instead of tabs" is unchecked,
the value of the "Insert tabs/spaces ..." box is ignored; instead one tab
is always used for the indent. 

 I would rename the "Insert tabs/spaces" box to "Indent width: " and change
the behavior such that 
1. If tabs are enabled each indent is composed of the necessary tabs and
spaces to occupy indent width.
2. If spaces are used instead of tabs, then the indent width is occupied
by solely spaces. 

This is equivalent to the tabstop, shiftwidth, and [no]expandtab, settings
in Vim. 

Most would argue that it is bad style for the a mixture of spaces and tabs
be used to occupy the indent width but 
a lot of legacy code is written in this style and it would be easier for
an editor to conform.

Also when the Displayed Tab Width value is changed, the change does not
 immediately take effect in open files.  The files have to be close and
reopened for the setting to take affect.

Cheers,
Ryan




 

jploski wrote on Sun Aug  5 20:17:39 MEST 2007:

I agree with you that the tab-related settings are confusing. However, I
doubt if Vim is a good model to follow. The settings in Vim are confusing
as well (I'm a long-time Vim user myself).

I think that the following would be sufficient:
1. An integer preference concerning tab stops. Tab stops are imaginary vertical
lines that divide the editor into equal-width strips, for example, every
8 characters (we assume a fixed-width font). The value preference might
be called the "tab width".
2. One radio-box preference for the TAB key behavior (insert spaces or insert
'\t's). This governs what happens when you press TAB - either a '\t' or
an appropriate number of spaces (based on the current caret position and
the tab stop preference) is inserted.

Regardless of the second preference, pressing the TAB key always moves the
caret to the next tab stop.
'\t' characters, if present, are always interpreted as "move to the next
tab stop".

There is another function which is affected by these preferences - the indent/outdent
function. Adding an extra level of indentation is simple: either a single
'\t' as or tab width spaces are inserted in front of the line. Removing
indentation from a line would remove the leading '\t', or the leading spaces,
or a mix consisting of some spaces followed by a '\t'. If there is not enough
whitespace to remove (i.e. the line's text starts somewhere before the first
tab stop), then all leading whitespace would be removed by the "outdent"
operation (just like in Vim).

I suspect that the above would be too simple for some users, but I don't
have a good idea why. Can you provide some real-life examples?

jvromans wrote on Fri Aug 10 23:06:27 MEST 2007:

Many (VERY MANY) sourcefiles currently are like

  sub foo {
  <4 spaces>if ( blah ) {
  <1 tab>while ( 1 ) {
  <1 tab><4 spaces>print ...;
  <1 tab>}
  <4 spaces>}
  }

To handle these, the following preferences would be necessary:

  Tab width:      [  8 ]
  Indent width:   [  4 ]
  Tab key does:   [ Indent / Tab / Indent in left margin, Tab elsewhere
]
  Indent with:    [ Spaces / Tabs+Spaces ]

Shift left/ shift right should adjust the selection by the "Indent width"
and rework the indentation according to the "Indent with" preference.

rphodges wrote on Wed Aug  8 18:08:10 MEST 2007:

What you are proposing assumes that "tab width" and "indent width" are always
equivalent.   However, I work on 
code where the coding convention is:

1.  All tabs should be treated as 8 characters.
2.  All indents should be indented by 4 characters.
3.  The indent of a line should be composed as many tabs as possible.
      This means that a line that is indented by 4 should be indented by
4 spaces.
      However, a line that is indented by 8 characters should be indented
by one tab 
      character. A line indented by 12 characters should be indented by
one tab 
      character and 4 spaces and so on.

When I work on these files I have to set the "tab width" to 8 characters.
 If I don't
existing text will not line up correctly.  This means that when I want an
indent width
of 4 characters, I can't do that by setting "tab width" to 4, because all
of the existing 
tabs will cause a mis-alignment of text.

Cheers,
Ryan