Re: [Pharo-dev] Proportional Tab Stops

[Ben Coman]

Tudor Girba wrote: 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 I think he indicated he did not have time right now :) Rick, I think that sounds like a good idea.  Maybe you could log a ticket on Fogbugz, so you can... * stay updated with any action on it * be involved in testing any proposed solutions * when you back into the Pharo groove, if its still an outstanding issue you might have a shot at it yourself. cheers -ben On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 9:43 AM, J.F. Rick <s...@je77.com> 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"