On 4/5/2017 1:00 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> 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.

So you reset the tab setting and all is good.


> And it wouldn't help if I want to look at the source code on a Windows box.

Why can't a Windows box format tabs the way you want?

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


--

Rick C

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