On Wed, 22 Apr 2015, Dale Snell wrote: > Nani?
? > C-q is <control-q>, and is bound to the Emacs command quoted-insert, which > inserts the next character literally. So the sequence C-q TAB should > insert a literal ASCII <tab> character at point. Should, but didn't. Point did not move. > The ruler is divided into characters, not inches. (At least it is > here. Oh. OK. > If you're using a proportionally-spaced font, then I don't know how it's > divided.) Don't know why I'd want to do that. > The "#" marks the "comment column". The "ΒΆ" (pilcrow) marks the > fill-column, the column at which Emacs wraps the line. BTW, if you click > on the ruler with C-MOUSE-2, it turns the tab indicator, "T", off and on. > (The point marker is a broken vertical bar; the exclamation points mark > every 5 characters.) OK. > Evidently, whatever is generating these lines is using tabs to separate > the various fields. When I copied the lines into an Emacs buffer, they > looked fairly reasonable. However, on my system, I have tab-width set to 4 > characters. To see your lines the way they showed up in your e-mail, I had > to change the setting to 8 characters. (The DEC-VT100-standard setting.) > So yes, if you have lines with a lot of TABs in them, you are going to see > lines extending beyond 80 columns. Maybe more than 160 columns. Note that > I did not see more than one TAB in a row. The samples were the first two header lines in an e-mail, not the data with which I worked. I've left the tab setting to whatever default emacs had at installation. For Python, C, and R I've set tab spacing in ~/.emacs. > Since I'm still not sure what you're doing, I don't have much to > recommend you do. If you don't have any control over the lines > you're receiving (and I gather you don't), then I don't know that > there's much you can do. (I'm assuming [*HAH!*] that you want or > need to keep the text in the same form that it came to you.) The lines were written here, the e-mail was used for an example. When I opened the file in joe I was able to fix all the multiple tabs and extraneous spaces emacs had generated so this task is finished. The source of the text file was a selective export from jpilot (the desktop side of the Palm PIMs while the handheld side is my Treo 700p 'smart' phone). Thanks, Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
