On 2017-04-05, alister  wrote:

> On Tue, 04 Apr 2017 23:06:49 +0000, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> That's the problem I was having.  I'm stuck in a nasty middle ground
>> where I want to indent my C code by multiples of 4 spaces, and many
>> programs (e.g. cat) assume a tab every 8 spaces.  So I wind up typing 4
>> spaces for the first level of indentation, tab for the second level, tab
>> plus four spaces for the third level, two tabs for the fourth, etc.  I'm
>> the first to admit that it's ugly - especially when moving a block of
>> code and changing its indentation.  But the only alternative is to do
>> away with tabs altogether, and as you say it's a PITA.  I can't remember
>> just what emacs did or how much work I'd have to do to make it work, but
>> it was almost as ugly, and not too compatible with cat and friends.
>
> this is nothing to do with cat as shuch it is the default unix tab
> specification
> it can be changed in many ways using the tabs command
>
> for example
>
> tabs +4 will set your tabs to every 4th column.

This would work fine on my own Linux box - at least until I forget to
reset it before looking at someone else's files tabbed every 8 characters.
And it wouldn't help if I want to look at the source code on a Windows box.

It seems that tab characters in source files are just not a good thing.

--
/~\  cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ /  I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
 X   Top-posted messages will probably be ignored.  See RFC1855.
/ \  HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored.  Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05