On Aug 19, 5:04 pm, Watts Martin <[email protected]> wrote: > LuKreme wrote: > > > For example, if I have a unix style directory listing of ls -ls that > > I want in tab-delimited lines I would like the first tab stop to be > > at say 12 characters, the second to be at 30, the third to be at 8, > > etc. > > Out of curiosity, how many other text editors -- not word processors, > but plain text editors like BBEdit -- have this functionality? The very > few I can find that have settable tab stops like Emacs and VDE evidently > allow this to let you make pretty tables in plain text, but they do > *not* insert a single hard tab character -- rather a mix of tabs and > spaces or just spaces so the ASCII text is aligned correctly.
at work, on windows, i use TextPad, which supports this fairly well. in a document's properties, you can enter a list of tab stops, much like you would with the unix "expand" command. it's great for quickly reading csv-formatted data without having to pull it into a real spreadsheet (which at work means excel, which means a slow startup and a strong chance of random column corruption due to auto-detection of dates, numbers, etc.). by default, it's a purely cosmetic feature--the columns are aligned to those points, but the file itself still contains only one real tab character per column per line, no matter how much whitespace it produced. however, you can switch on a mode that will translate the tabs to the appropriate number of spaces to preserve the current tab settings if you want to freeze it that way. (the main limitation is that (AFAIK) there's no way to save the list of stops between one instance of opening a file and the next. this isn't a big deal for me, as 99% of the time i'm using this with data i'll only need to deal with once.) like other text-table-oriented stuff (search-and-replace within block- select, etc.), it's something i often wish bbedit did better.... -- Aaron Davies [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the "BBEdit Talk" discussion group on Google Groups. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at <http://groups.google.com/group/bbedit?hl=en> If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem, please email "[email protected]" rather than posting to the group. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit>
