> From: Mark Swinkels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: RE: [Eap-list] Smart tabs? > Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 09:01:28 -0800 > > Its a nice idea but its way down on my list. Being a good text editor is > only a tiny part of being a good code editor. IDEA shines in its > understanding of the meaning of what I'm typing and its ability to help me > write it with context sensitive completion, help and navigation. I > occasionally have to go back to CodeWarrior and am amazed by how clunky it > feels, but that feeling of clunkiness has nothing to do with the text > editor, it has to do with CodeWarrior having no idea of what the code I'm > typing means. IDEA lets me think about the code, I don't want to think about > things like tabs and spaces.
Please read that last sentence you said again. I don't want to think about things like tabs and spaces either, THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT, I would rather IDEA do that. Unfortunately, all editors force one to think of such things... or at least to make global settings that may or may not be right based on what project or even down to the few lines of source code that one is working on. Those same settings aren't necessarily the same settings that other developers on the project are using either. I don't know about you, but I have to work with other developers on code together and I don't want to be telling them or be told what the spacing/tabs settings are. > With editors like IDEA which let blocks be indented and unindented easily > whatever the characters used to encode the indent there isn't much reason to > use tabs. Sure the source file is a little bit smaller but that isn't the > concern it once was. I prefer tabs because it gives the code viewer (not necessarily the author) the flexibility to have it spaced however they want. On a large screen I might want a tab to be four spaces while on a laptop I may prefer only two. My preferred choice of four versus two is not encoded into the file--it is a setting in my editor (as it should be). When using spaces, the *author* that imposes this choice on *everyone*. That is the smaller problem of two I have with spaces. The other is that there are no editors (that I am aware of) that will detect and use the correct amount of spaces to use in place of the tab key **based upon what is in the file**. I work on many different projects at work and I occasionally work with open-source projects that do not originate at my employer... and you can be sure that each project has their own tab/spacing conventions. Boy IDEA would shine if it could detect the right thing to do based on a per-file basis. I'm certain I have sent suggestions to IntelliJ on this subject in particular. > My feeling, the text editor is 'good enough'. Concentrate on the stuff that > really makes IDEA unique. I believe this is an opportunity for IDEA to be unique. Sure, it's not one of those in-your-face features one will see immediately like auto-import generation... you might not even realize it's there after working with some source for a while since IDEA is simply doing the right thing for you... but you will realize it after having to use some other editor that isn't configured correctly. You might also realize it after someone telling you what the spacing standards are for the next project and you can be practically agnostic of those issues since you don't have to care. IDEA just does the right thing. It's a nice dream and I hope others share it with me. ~ David Smiley MITRE _______________________________________________ Eap-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellij.com/mailman/listinfo/eap-list
