Post by @gaditb@icosahedron.website

@gaditb@icosahedron.website · 3 hours ago

Also I haven't tested it but I'm pretty sure the solution to tabs vs. spaces is:

- newline+tab(s) for indenting
- space(s)+tab for (contextual) alignment

Line-initial tabs give fixed, foldable offsets -- adjacent lines with N initial tabs are lined up to start flush with each other. An adjacent line with N+1 initial tabs is given a user-configued indent.

A tab following a space is marked as a tabstop and aligned to matching* tabstops in adjacent rows.

I'm not sure whether that is enough as-is -- and minimal spacing can be done by adding more spaces, and tabstops can be skipped by e.g. `space+tab+tab` -- or whether some algorithm matching by context, what characters proceed/follow the space+tab, as matched as possible (effectively translating to e.g. "line up this `", <tab>"` with the next `", <tab>"` in the previous line".)

aschmitz

@aschmitz@ostatus.lardbucket.org · 2 hours ago

@gaditb I'm generally on team "two spaces for every non-aligning indent", but yeah if you use tabs this seems to be the only reasonable way to do things.

It does mean you can't really do something like an 80-column rule unless you set a maximum tab width and everyone uses it to edit, though, at which point I'm not entirely clear what benefits tabs are getting you other than being slightly easier to enter in indentation-unaware editor, but if you don't care about line widths it's fine.

Gadfly (-booq-)

@gaditb@icosahedron.website · 2 hours ago

@aschmitz What it gives: Georgia is a nice programming font.

I think you can prolly still do an 80-column rule, it just is slightly more complicated to compute.

aschmitz

@aschmitz@ostatus.lardbucket.org · 2 hours ago

@gaditb Ah, somehow I thought you were also using spaces for alignment of hanging indents, but that won't work for variable-width fonts, so fair enough.

Gadfly (-booq-)

@gaditb@icosahedron.website · 2 hours ago

@aschmitz (Are "hanging indents" what I described as "line-initial tabs"? or the other ones.)

~6 more replies

aschmitz

@aschmitz@ostatus.lardbucket.org · 2 hours ago

@gaditb I was more thinking of like

~~~
id = [1, 0,
0, 1]
~~~

or whatever, where you want the next line to line up horizontally with data in the line above.

Gadfly (-booq-)

@gaditb@icosahedron.website · 1 hour ago

@aschmitz My goal is to be able to say "line up the ', 's".

... I guess "write the ' ' as ' <tab>' and treat that as a tab-stop" isn't enough to that.

... although if we say "the first space in particular must be aligned" and "only tabs are extendable" and... include line-initial tabs in that? Then I think?

```
id = [1, <tab>0,
<tab>0, <tab>1]

<^first tab expands until the ' 's line up, implicitly the ', 's li e up as well>
........<^last tabs of line expand to the same width, whatever that is>
```