Re: Whitespace cleanup, tab-width and religion.

[Michaël Cadilhac]

"Rajesh Vaidheeswarran" <address@hidden> writes:

> As the author of whitespace.el, it was my intent to keep tabs at 8
> characters.

Yep, it was clear enough :-)

> People set tab-widths to whatever they please on their favorite
> editors. However, there is no way to portably move the definition of
> TAB across people and platforms, other than the value of 8 spaces.

I do agree on the point.  But, again, isn't a misfeature that changing
tab-width and  using whitespace.el screws up the  formating (in Emacs,
only, here) ?

I mean the following. Tab-width is 2, spaces are ` ' and tabs `->'.
My document is :

int main ()
{
->printf("Hello !");
->/* Oh, I forgot the \n ! */
->if (true)
->->if (true)
->->->if (really(true))
        printf("\n");
}

If I use whitespace-cleanup here, the last printf will be indented
with the first if, because the 8 spaces will be replaced with a <TAB>.

We are OK: there's no way to have consistency between editors, but
maybe this would be an improvement on the self-consistency of Emacs,
nop ?

And  after  all, if  the  user,  with the  help  of  great tools  like
whitespace.el, keeps a  well formated use of TABs,  this would enhance
portability of these TABs (modulo their size), isn't it ?

-- 
 |      Michaël `Micha' Cadilhac     |    Le copillage-collage                |
 |         Epita/LRDE Promo 2007     |       tue le programmeur.              |
 |  http://michael.cadilhac.name     |           -- Dictons LRDE              |
 `--JID: address@hidden'                                   -  --'

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