Thank you for this precision. I agree that the modeline might belong in
<head>, I was just trying it in both places I knew it should work.
However, in practice, and I've mentioned this before, the modeline
conflicts with copyright and other headers and is an unwelcome intrusion
to users of other editors. For this reason, at my place of work at
least, it goes at the bottom where seemingly no one cares.
A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
Russell Bateman wrote:
I found that I got an error with
<!-- vim: ts=2 sw=2: -->
Error detected while processing modelines:
line 789 (the last line of my file, but I tried it also on lines 1
and 2 (after the <html> tag) with the same result)
E518: Unknown option: -->
Hit ENTER or type command to continue
Instead, I had to put this:
<!--
vim: ts=2 sw=2:
-->
I wonder why.
[...]
As Christian Robinson mentioned earlier in this thread, there are two
kinds of Vim modelines. The first kind is like the one above; you can
have anything (plus a space) before "vim:" but you can't have anything
(other than spaces and tabs) after the last option setting, until the
end-of-line. Thus you could use
<!--
vim: ts=2 sw=2
-->
or
<!-- vim: ts=2 sw=2
-->
The second kind of modeline consists of a ":set" statement between
colons, preceded by anything plus whitespace plus "vim" and followed
by anything on the same line. Thus you could use
<!-- vim: set ts=2 sw=2 :-->
_with_ the word "set" and with a colon before the end-of-comment.
(This also implies that it would be a Bad_Thing™, at any future time,
to patch Vim so as to introduce an option named 'set'.)
BTW, IMHO that modeline has a more "logical" place in the <HEAD>
section, next to the <META> tags if any, but that's just my
preference, it's not cast in bronze for everybody everywhere.
See ":help modeline".
Best regards,
Tony.
