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Re: [StrongED] Manual - Tabstops



On 2018-06-25 12:34, Richard Torrens (lists) wrote:
Menu in a window -> Edit -> Tabkey -> Tabstops opens a Tabstops definition
dbox. Here Tabstops can be defined and they actually do something.

However I can make the Tab key insert nothing but spaces using this.

The tabkey is meant primarily to take the caret forwards to the next tab
stop on the line. It's as if you pressed cursor-right a few times. Only if that means passing further to the right than the rightmost non-blank data in the line would an editor then insert spaces, to fill in the gap between where it had been and where the caret is now so that if you then type some
non-blank characters, they are separated from previous data by spaces.

You cannot (in my editor anyway, if that's what you're expecting) enter a tab character with the tab key, if you're in a display mode where tabs are
expanded.  You possibly could do in a non-tab display mode (though in my
editor tab then moves the caret between different areas of the window). I
suppose it might be possible to map the tab key into production of x'09'
if that's what you expect... but then you won't be using tabs stops any
longer.


In the editor I use right now, the compression of the data in the file as it is written back to disk (ie inserting tab characters to reduce the number of spaces) happens after you decide to save the file to disk. You wouldn't see that happen, unless you then opened the file in eg a binary or hex-dump
mode and then saw the tab characters.

If I open a file that contains tab characters AND I've told my editor to
expand them, then it does that and when I see the file in the editor, the
tab chars are no longer there because they've been replaced by spaces.


--
Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own

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