begin quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 12:14:27AM -0800: > SJS wrote: > >The eye *believes* whitespace, but it's also not very good at it. It's > >okay at determining that yeah, verily, there *is* whitespace, but it's > >not very good at determining how much. For very small programs, that's > >okay; but these languages are no longer being used solely for small > >programs.
...to follow my own comment, one of the neat things in many IDEs (and some editors too) is the thin line that marks some column boundary, typically column 80. Having a reference other than the edge of the window is, amazingly enough, quite useful. > I never understood why spaces and tabs cannot be displayed with > something visible. There are several (proprietary) programming editors that do just that. Flexibly. (Some of those editors are very nearly an IDE in and of themsevles.) In vi(m), I use ":set list" and ":set nolist" frequently -- it lets me look for tabs (^I) and trailing spaces in the source code. [snip] > Come to think of it, does anyone know how I can modify the fonts that > show up in gnome terminal and vim, and even the console while I'm at it, > and any other fonts that are used by programs like firefox and > thunderbird? Come to think of it, I can't be the only one who has ever > wanted such a thing. Is anyone aware of fonts already so modified? Well, gvim will let you choose your own font. Presumably, xrdb(1) would let you set the font-string for the X application of your choice. I haven't tried this. It's been ages since I've messed with fonts. -- When someone's preferred language or data format a custom editor requires Then the benefits of the language are moot, they're looking for tool buyers. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
