On 11/03/18 15:04, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
First of all, I'm sorry to disappoint you. This patch has been floating
around for a long time and has never made it in. It's not urgent, and
not a small thing to include, with the result I have been postponing it
for a long time.
But it is a small thing to include. Vim already includes code that is
called when a tab needs to be displayed and works out how many columns
need to be skipped to get to the next multiple of the tabstop setting.
From what I remember all the variable tabs change does is check to see
if the new setting has been set and if so it looks up how many columns
to skip instead of calculating it. It's really not that complicated, and
it has the advantage that if the new setting isn't set then the only
line of new code that is called is the one that checks whether the
setting is used. If not then only the existing code runs, which means
that anyone who doesn't use the new setting has no chance of seeing any
alteration in behaviour.
The only slightly iffy thing about it is that it doesn't play well with
the linebreak setting, but that's a known issue with the current tab
implementation as well.
If Vim was in some sort of feature freeze state where it was considered
to be complete for all time and no changes apart from bug fixes would
ever be made then I could understand your reluctance to add this, but
you've been perfectly willing to add far larger and far more disruptive
changes to Vim even when there's been no user-driven request for them at
all. Why is this one such a big problem?
A few statements needs further discussion though. I have recently been
involved in a product launch, which fortunately had the resources to do
user studies and gather statistics about usage from different kinds of
users. Including doing user surveys that are statistically sound.
What has become very clear is that there is no direct relation between
what comes up in forums and what users really need or want. For bugs
and things that are hard to understand it can work, the more people
complain the more likely it is a real problem.
When it comes to new features or changes in existing features, it can go
in any direction. Some user may loudly express their opinion, and also
get other users to say they also want it. But when asking the average
user, it turns out they won't need it, or even get confused by it.
And in other cases users don't ask for functionality, but when we add it
then lots of users find it very useful.
You can tell what sorts of functions people are likely to find useful by
looking at the sort of tasks people are likely to do. Very few people
are likely to want a terminal emulator built into an editor because they
already have ways to get at command lines outside the editor. They may
certainly make use of the feature once it's there, but there are very
few tasks that they couldn't do in an external command line that they
can now do inside a Vim terminal window. Very few people are likely to
want interprocess communication because it's not the sort of function
people would even expect an editor to have.
But editing tabular information is something that a great many people
do. It's not just a matter of working with tab-separated data files. How
often do you want to assemble columns of information in a text file
where the columns are inconvenient sizes? You wrote Vim so I'm sure you
use it for all sorts of things, and I bet there are times when you've
found that spaces are annoying for getting the columns aligned while
tabs between every column waste space and mean you run out of screen.
That happens to me a couple of times a week, and I doubt my requirements
are anything exceptional. That's the sort of common real-world situation
this change addresses, and right now it's something that can't be done
in Vim at all. If I want columns of text in a reasonable amount of space
I need to use a spreadsheet, and then I have to keep going through
removing all the spurious ks and js and ZZs that appear all over the
place when I forget which environment I'm in.
I would bet money that far more people find themselves thinking "I wish
Vim was better at handling columns of data" than "I wish Vim had better
interprocess communication" or "I wish Vim had more ways of writing
regular expressions" or "I wish Vim was programmable in my favourite
language". Those are developer requirements. Variable tabstops are an
end-user feature: a basic function that's of use to everyone rather than
an advanced addition that only experts will care about. Shouldn't
end-user features be given priority?
--
Matthew Winn
--
--
You received this message from the "vim_dev" maillist.
Do not top-post! Type your reply below the text you are replying to.
For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "vim_dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
