Surely this is a pipe dream, but my team and I were revisiting the age-old tabs vs. spaces debate again this morning, and I once again lamented the fact that "Elastic Tab Stops" have never become more of a thing in programming editors. The basic idea is that a [tab] character no longer represents a fixed number of spaces, but rather dynamically indents to match [tab] characters found on preceding and following lines. Here's the inventor's description and a demo (from 2006!) for reference: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
I'd love for this idea to spread-- in particular to BBEdit. ;-) Slightly OT: As much as I love BBEdit, editors like Sublime Text, Brackets and Atom that offer extreme "modding" capability are starting to become more appealing to me. The Atom community for example, already has this elastic tabs idea in the works: http://discuss.atom.io/t/elastic-tabstops/16. More generally, the issue isn't that I want a TON of bells and whistles in my editor, it's that I increasingly want the ability to cherry pick the 2 or 3 that remove the maximum amount of pain from my day. So far I've made the choice to largely align my workflow with what BBEdit has available, but the venn diagram of (BBEdit's features) and (Brian's preferences) may be starting to diverge. The troubling part is that there's nothing I can do about that but post this kind of feature request here and hope enough other people do too that it makes financial sense for Bare Bones to do something about it. (Or switch editors, which I don't even want to contemplate.) -- This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem, please email "supp...@barebones.com" rather than posting to the group. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit> --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BBEdit Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bbedit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to bbedit@googlegroups.com.
