Re: elastic tabstops implemented for GTK

["Nick Gravgaard" <me nickgravgaard com>]

On 19/09/2007, Alex Jones <alex weej com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-19 at 08:14 +0200, Nick Gravgaard wrote:
> > I thought I'd drop you a mail to tell you that I've turned the gedit patch
> > into a proper plugin and made the following fixes:
> >
> > * Other chars than just \n can now terminate paragraphs
> > * Italic and bold characters are now handled properly
>
> Yay! :D
>
> > * The minimum width and padding width values can now be configured using
> > gconf
> >
> > It should be pretty trivial to add the code to anything that
> > uses GtkSourceView, and probably GtkTextView too.
> >
> > Have a look at
> > nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/#gedit for more
> > information, and please email me if you have any problems.
>
> Good work, Nick!
>
> I am noticing that after so much messing with it, it becomes pretty slow to
> type and delete characters. Deleting any lines using tabs seems to fix this.
> It seems as if you might be calculating layout unnecessarily.

I am - to fix this I need to at least cache some information as the
file is modified. This will be my next task - improving performance.

> Also it doesn't seem to work when you have "insert spaces instead of tabs"
> enabled in GEdit's preferences, nor does it respect the "tab width" setting
> for line indentation. I'm not really sure how you could possibly work around
> these integration problems, but I thought I would bring them up anyway.

If you remove all the tab characters from a file the text widget will
not have any text after a tab character to align with a tabstop, so it
cannot work. That said, it is possible to operate in an environment
where the coding standard mandates spaces: the python plugin that
converts files between the different formats can be told to do this
automatically on loading/saving files (converting from spaces on
loading and to spaces on saving). The tab width setting is taken into
account when doing this.

Nick