On 11/06/10 03:27, Seebs wrote:
On 2010-11-06, Steve Holden<st...@holdenweb.com> wrote:
If someone were to use a text editor which had always historically
mangled whitespace I would find myself wondering why they found it
necessary to restrict themselves to such stone-age tools.
I have yet to find an editor that allows me to, well, *edit*, more
comfortably than vi.
As to what it does with whitespace... What it does is exactly what
is most desireable in every other kind of file I edit. I wouldn't
normally refer to it as "mangling" in the pejorative sense; it mostly
leaves spaces alone, but when preserving indentation from one line
to the next, uses tabs. That, it turns out, is useful and desireable
in nearly all programming languages, and in particular, in all
the other programming languages I use.
I think in a previous thread, you mentioned that you use nvi.
While I can't speak to the knobs-and-dials that nvi offers, in
vim, you can twiddle the 'expandtab' option (along with the
associated 'tabwidth' and 'shiftwidth' settings) to get whatever
behavior is deemed "correct" for the project you're working on.
So if I'm working on a project with PEP-8 4-spaces-per-indent, I'll
:set sw=4 ts=4 et
and then if the file erroneously has tabs in it, I'll just issue
:retab
to fix it[1].
-tkc
[1]
Yes, if you have string literals with tabs that you want to keep
in them, the solution is a little more complex, but doable;
though in such cases I'd recommend using "\t" instead of a
literal tab.
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