Hi, Glad to hear from you.
Thanks for spotting the issue with tabbing. I think your suggestion of having tabs spacing being proportional with the font size makes sense. Could we interest you in submitting a slice for this? :) Cheers, Doru On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 9:43 AM, J.F. Rick <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I'm writing for two reasons. First, I wanted to let people know that I > haven't disappeared. I'm just having to take a break as I finish up with my > current academic post. As I am no longer going to be there, Pharo > contributions don't help the department. So, I can't justify devoting any > time to Pharo. But, I'm still interested in Athens, multitouch support, and > Pharo for beginners. In October, I move back to Atlanta and will start a > company. At that point, I aim to be back, though I may concentrate a bit > more on server technology (full version of newest QRCode specifications > half way done). > > Second, I wanted to mention a slight annoyance and suggest a solution. > Background: I taught a class on introduction / intermediate programming in > Pharo the last few years. One thing I try to teach my students is to use > proper indention for their code. Unlike Python (great syntax for a first > language), you do not need to indent in Smalltalk for code to work properly > so students don't have to properly use indention to organize their code. > For tiny bits of code (as is required in introductory programming), > indention is not that important but it gets more important as they advance. > Even my better students often used bad indention practices, though I > emphasized it in class and all sample code I gave them was properly > indented. In class, I often solved problems and demonstrated code. So that > students could see what I typed, I increased the size of the font (24pt > standard font). Though the font increased, the tab spacing remained the > same. So, when I indented with one tab, it looked much smaller than a tab > would have looked on their 10pt code editor. I saw people using spaces to > indent code, which I never talked about. My guess is that they were trying > to replicate the amount of space that my code was indented. They saw that a > tab looked too big and used spaces. A simple solution is for tab spacing in > code panes to increase proportionally with the font size. I feel like > suggesting that as an improvement for Pharo 4. Does that seem reasonable? > Are there arguments against it? > > Cheers, > > Jeff > > -- > Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D. > http://www.je77.com/ > Skype ID: jochenrick > -- www.tudorgirba.com "Every thing has its own flow"
