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Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?


From: Elena
Subject: Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 05:14:53 -0800 (PST)
User-agent: G2/1.0

On Dec 3, 11:49 am, Torsten Mueller <dev-n...@shared-files.de> wrote:
> > Thank goddess somebody invented modal editing. It is the most
> > effective way to edit text I can think of, now that I know it
>
> I don't know what you mean with "modal editing". Indenting and setting
> backets in pairs and such stuff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_%28text_editor%29#Modal_editing

> When I write code I want to have the things done truely that way I do
> them. What I don't need is any process in the background doing
> something for me, especially I don't want him to modify my text based
> on some "rules" defined by others or by accident. If I give him 3
> spaces to indent a line I want 3 spaces. And if I give him 7 spaces on
> the next line I want 7. Well, I never do this. But I must be able to
> do this! Having an editor doing indenting and spelling and more is
> like a policeman watching my fingers and telling me always "Don't do
> this!" and "Don't do that!". - I don't want to justify my behaviour
> towards an editor. I think this is legal.

I somewhat share your feelings.  I remember having an hard time
understanding why Emacs was capitalizing "i" whenever I wrote a for
loop, until I realized it was an auto-correction effort for text
buffers.

However, having your editor automating some text entering ends up
being more productive.  I remember being amazed by Electric C
features.  Wanting total control over the result of every keystroke is
akin to micro-managing: you end up doing everything yourself.  Let's
call it "micro-editing" ;-)  Nowadays, I don't even enter spaces
unless they are needed to separate tokens.  Then I feed sources to a
source-code pretty-printer and I'm not fussy about its output.

Of course, sometimes, you really want to enter what you are typing.
For instance, when using Paredit - especially when you are just
learning it - you may want to skip the smart editing it forces on
you.  For these cases, a `quoted-insert' suffice.  But these are
special cases.


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