elastic tabs

[fmarcia]

As Sublime Text is THE cutting-egde-text-editor, it could be interesting to implement this: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops?

What do you think?

[vim]

really nice, but what if i open this file in another 'plain' editor, i will see a mess... as well as if i send this file to a friend, etc. the problem is it is not standard behavior.

[fmarcia]

Yeah, it should be optional, of course...

... or implemented as a plugin, if possible.

[jdknezek]

Upvote! End the tabs vs. spaces war!

[75th Trombone]

Another upvote. This would be a marvelous option.

[gpfsmurf]

really nice, but what if i open this file in another 'plain' editor, i will see a mess... as well as if i send this file to a friend, etc. the problem is it is not standard behavior.

Actually, when the file is opened in another editor, it looks perfect, because the file is saved with spaces only.

It's been done for gedit (http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/#gedit). When you open the file, it's internally converted to tabs, and when you save it, it's converted back to spaces.

I think we could make this work in Sublime if there was a way to set non-uniform tabstops on different lines.

[adzenith]

I just wanted to bump this thread!
Will we see something like this in Sublime Text X?

[oxman]

Awesome ! A must have !
I want this feature !

[jps]

I'm personally not a fan of elastic tabstops, primarily because they significantly increase the cost of laying out text: it changes the problem from a local, per-line one, into a global problem: a modification on one line can change how every line in the buffer is rendered.

Although I haven't used any software that supports elastic tabstops, I suspect that in the real world, they aren't as handy as they seem: because layout is now global, a very long variable name in once function can introduce excessive whitespace in every other function in the file (i.e., blocks will be aligned with other blocks hundreds of lines away).

The primary problem elastic tabstops solve is preserving vertical alignment of neighboring blocks of text. I believe this would be better solved by the editor doing so explicitly, inserting normal whitespace as required.

[oxman]

I don't understand why you speak of align the whole text and at the end only of lines above or belove the current line.
The elastic tabstop works only for the lines above or belove the current line when you have at least N numbers of elastic tabstop, where N is greater than or equal the N of the current line.