On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:07 PM David McMackins <cont...@mcmackins.org> wrote: > > > What EDIT preferences would you want to set globally and have them > > always active? > > In my particular case, I always want full tabs (real tab characters) > when I strike the tab key. I don't like how when I read a file with > tabs, I am prompted to expand them into spaces.
Do you see that in EDIT? (It's been quite some time since I used it and I don't recall the behavior.) But this is YMMV. Personally, the last thing I want is full tab characters. Coding styles are all over the map. By default, a tab expands to 8 spaces, but many coding standards like 4 spaces for indentation, and some now like two. The last time I ran into a case where tabs vs spaces mattered, it was in make files for an older version of make, where you got funny errors if you used spaces where it wanted a tab. The make file looked fine on screen, but make wouldn't correctly process it. I considered that either a bug in make or bad design. A more modern editor might let me specify what happens when I press the tab key, and insert the number of spaces expected to correspond with the coding style used by the source I'm working on. I press one key but get the right indentation. I've spent the odd hour *converting* tabs to the number of spaces desired for what I'm doing. If I actually *need* a literal tab character (almost never), I embed ^I. ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
