Re: elastic tabstops implemented for GTK

["Nick Gravgaard" <me nickgravgaard com>]

Thanks Alex,

The proportional font stuff is really just a nice side effect - this
idea has all sorts of nice implications. Off the top of my head,
imagine a program like ls that outputs a list of directories and
files. At the moment ls needs to be aware of the number of columns of
the console to which it is writing, and then it inserts spaces and
newlines to make things line up. Resizing the console has no effect on
the layout. Now, I haven't gotten round to implementing word wrap yet,
but imagine if ls output a simple tab delimited list of directories
and files instead, and the console undertood elastic tabstops (with
word wrap implemented). Resizing the console would work, as would
proportional fonts. Also, imagine how much easier piping between
programs becomes when simple tab delimited text streams works like
this!

There are many other potential uses too :)

Nick


On 13/07/07, Alex Jones <alex weej com> wrote:
> You are truly a legend. I'm all for making things easier for those who
> prefer to use proportional fonts. I love unicode! ℃…
>
> On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 23:39 +0200, Nick Gravgaard wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I thought some of you might be interested in some work I did recently.
> > I came up with an idea I call elastic tabstops which I think goes some
> > way towards solving the problems we programmers have with indenting
> > and aligning code, and I've implemented this in GTK. At the moment
> > this exists in the form of a patch for gedit, but at some point I plan
> > to make a proper GTK class for it.
> >
> > For more information, please see http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
> >
> > I'd love to hear any feedback, and really love to see this
> > functionality appear in other projects.
> >
> > Tell me what you think,
> > Nick
> > _______________________________________________
> > gtk-devel-list mailing list
> > gtk-devel-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
> --
> Alex Jones
> http://alex.weej.com/