Re: Indentation with spaces

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:47 +0000
> From: goncholden <goncholden@protonmail.com>
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org, emacs-erc@gnu.org
> 
> Yes, but emacs should allow a number of possibilities rather than being 
> prescriptive on its use.  For instance, it does not allow multiple tabs at 
> start of line, which happens with legacy codes (e.g. in fortran).

Of course, it does.  You just didn't study the documentation of the
Fortran mode or the built-in documentation of Fortran-related commands
to discover those facilities which do allow what you want.  See my
other message in this thread.

> I suggest a rethinking and the introduction of a set of function that help 
> the setting up of space and tab functionality.

I suggest that you first study what is already available, before you
even consider the remote possibility of the need to rethink it.  I
submit that you don't know enough about this to make such suggestions.

> whitespace-mode should also be extended to allow users to set colour hex 
> codes for the various highlighting regions.

It already does, please see the documentation of that mode.  If you
do, you will see that whitespace-mode provides you with no less than
13 customizable faces, through which you can control every aspect of
its display.

> For instance, whilst the highlighting of trailing spaces in vibrant, the one 
> used for tabs suffers from a very low contrast ratio.

Contrast is to a large degree subjective, and in addition depends on
the background color you use, which cannot be known precisely enough
in advance.  If the color of some face is not to your liking, you can
customize it by providing colors that suit you better.

> Efforts should be directed towards applying accessibility measures for which 
> there are actual standards (e.g. WCAG).  One can also use
> a colour wheel with equally seperated colours in terms of contrast ratio for 
> increased vibrancy, which is another good measure.

We (the Emacs developers) know all about that, and apply that as much
as possible for setting the defaults.  Still, given unrelated user
customizations and the particulars of the system where Emacs is run,
customizations to change the default values are sometimes needed, and
Emacs provides you with infinite ways of doing that.

Where customizations can easily solve such problems, complaints about
the defaults mean just one thing: that the person who complains didn't
bother to look for those customizable options and use them, and
instead prefers to accuse Emacs of incompetency, while the real
incompetency is elsewhere.