Martin Sekera added the comment:
But tab characters are rendered by the terminal into spaces. During stdout
processing, when the term encounters a \t (0x09), it inserts (into the term
buffer that is displayed to the user) as many spaces (0x20) as needed to move
the cursor to the nearest tab
Martin Sekera added the comment:
Copy that. Would the patch be acceptable if the '\t' was simply changed to 4
spaces?
To discuss further, it is my opinion that the interpreter should output a \t
character when the TAB key is pressed, as this is the behavior of nearly every
shell
Martin Sekera added the comment:
In the end it doesn't matter what characters end up on the terminal. What
matters is the UX of not having to press backspace several times to unindent.
That's sloppy design.
The issue of forcing a custom indent width on a user who might have their tab
stops
Martin Sekera added the comment:
Is it necessary to force a predefined tab width (4) onto the user here? I
prefer 2-character tabs for example, and have all my terminals set up
accordingly (setterm --regtabs 2). I presume many people prefer 8-column tabs,
hence the default width in most
