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coteditor / CotEditor

Lightweight Plain-Text Editor for macOS
https://coteditor.com
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6.37k stars 432 forks source link

Elastic Tabstops #1333

Open jpmhouston opened 2 years ago

jpmhouston commented 2 years ago

I'm interested in a text editor that featured elastic tabstops. For an open-source app such as this I'd be willing to work on the implementation.

Elastic tabstops is a great, old (ish) idea for source code tab handling but has been languishing without much support from text editors. It's described on the website https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

I was considering looking into the Atom plug-in that attempted to implement this, but the author talked about trouble with the app API not having the flexibility needed for the feature. And now Atom is dead so... I also thought about looking for/contributing to a VSCode plug-in. Inventor Nick had a plug-in for old VS, maybe similarities with the modern might mean it was possible, but then I remembered that I still hate everything relating to Microsoft.

Also just wondering if any of the contributors to this app has had elastic tabstops on their radar in the slightest. After all, it was a long time ago that it headlined on whatever-the-HN-of-the-day-was (slashdot/digg/...). Thanks

1024jp commented 2 years ago

Thank you for the request. Sounds interesting. However, at the same time, I worry about the performance, especially on large files. Let me think.

martinengelke commented 2 months ago

Would be perfect for languages like python where tabs (alignment) are intended as part of the code. I often stumbled across that, coming from c.