Re: FW: elastic tabstops and gvim's GTK text widget
--- Nick Gravgaard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Zdenek, On 30/10/06, Zdenek Sekera [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Nick, -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nick Gravgaard Sent: 19 October 2006 13:42 To: vim-dev@vim.org Subject: elastic tabstops and gvim's GTK text widget Hi all, I am the creator of a mechanism called elastic tabstops (see nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/). Right now, my plan is to try and implement this in as many text widgets as possible so that the editors that use them will be able to easily add this as a feature. Since vim (well, gvim really) is my editor of choice I thought I'd start with that. Could someone tell me which GTK widget gvim uses and what problems they think I might encounter? Any other comments are also welcome. I went to your side and read all about it, sounds very (read *very*) interesting. I would surely love it. As a comment, I'd suggest you reconsider implementing it only for gvim+GTK (as that's what I understood from all I read). First, it will quite significantly limit number of people who would be interested (not all have GTK when you go outside Linux) second, some people just do not use gvim (I for one use almost only console vim, I can't get gvim running with pleasing fonts and if it is not pleasing to my eyes, I don't like it). You seem to see a big advantage is being able to use non-monospce fonts. Sure, it is an advantage (perhaps even a big one), however, one gets very far with monospaced fonts, and I feel lots of people would think that way. In other words, those who can/want to run non-monospaced, great!, but don't leave out all the rest of us who have accomodated themselves well with monospaced outside of your project. Brief: consider seriously also the console vim. I think you may be right - I have a feeling vim is probably just treating it's GTK widget in a similar way to how it treats a console. If that's true, adding proportional font support is probably a much bigger task than I would like to solve right now... BTW, does anyone know if it's possible to implement elastic tabstops as a vim script? It would need to be called whenever a character is inserted or deleted and would then modify the size of the tabstops. The tabstops would need to have different widths on different lines. Is this possible? Actually, you might be able to get it done with Vimscript, but you'd need to use space characters instead of tabs. You would map TAB to call a function which examines the current line, the line above, the line below, and inserts the correct number of spaces, and also adjusts the lines above or below accordingly. Also, if you're inserting spaces instead of tabs, it's backwards compatible with just about everything, which would be great. cheers, Peter Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com
Re: FW: elastic tabstops and gvim's GTK text widget
Peter Hodge wrote: --- Nick Gravgaard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Zdenek, On 30/10/06, Zdenek Sekera [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Nick, -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nick Gravgaard Sent: 19 October 2006 13:42 To: vim-dev@vim.org Subject: elastic tabstops and gvim's GTK text widget Hi all, I am the creator of a mechanism called elastic tabstops (see nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/). Right now, my plan is to try and implement this in as many text widgets as possible so that the editors that use them will be able to easily add this as a feature. Since vim (well, gvim really) is my editor of choice I thought I'd start with that. Could someone tell me which GTK widget gvim uses and what problems they think I might encounter? Any other comments are also welcome. I went to your side and read all about it, sounds very (read *very*) interesting. I would surely love it. As a comment, I'd suggest you reconsider implementing it only for gvim+GTK (as that's what I understood from all I read). First, it will quite significantly limit number of people who would be interested (not all have GTK when you go outside Linux) second, some people just do not use gvim (I for one use almost only console vim, I can't get gvim running with pleasing fonts and if it is not pleasing to my eyes, I don't like it). You seem to see a big advantage is being able to use non-monospce fonts. Sure, it is an advantage (perhaps even a big one), however, one gets very far with monospaced fonts, and I feel lots of people would think that way. In other words, those who can/want to run non-monospaced, great!, but don't leave out all the rest of us who have accomodated themselves well with monospaced outside of your project. Brief: consider seriously also the console vim. I think you may be right - I have a feeling vim is probably just treating it's GTK widget in a similar way to how it treats a console. If that's true, adding proportional font support is probably a much bigger task than I would like to solve right now... BTW, does anyone know if it's possible to implement elastic tabstops as a vim script? It would need to be called whenever a character is inserted or deleted and would then modify the size of the tabstops. The tabstops would need to have different widths on different lines. Is this possible? Actually, you might be able to get it done with Vimscript, but you'd need to use space characters instead of tabs. You would map TAB to call a function which examines the current line, the line above, the line below, and inserts the correct number of spaces, and also adjusts the lines above or below accordingly. Also, if you're inserting spaces instead of tabs, it's backwards compatible with just about everything, which would be great. But how will you save information about where is a tab and where is a space? You have to save tabs in a file on disk and in vim you'll have to remember where those tab were in some buffer local variable. cheers, Peter Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com
