Elastic Tabstops — An End to Tabs vs. Spaces?

An anonymous reader writes "Along with Vi versus Emacs, the tabs versus spaces argument must rank as one of the classic holy wars among coders. Here's an attempt to solve it by making tabstops expand or shrink to fit their contents. The concept's pretty cool to use, so be sure to have a play with the demo!"

Comments

Re:A standard tab length would be easier

[GroeFaZ]

Anyone know of an editor that has this?

If you want that from an IDE, eclipse does that, and pretty robustly at that. I wouldn't want to miss it.

For more simple editors for a quick text edit, my favorite is EditPlus. It lets you choose between classical tabs and whitespace tabs, as how long (in characters) a tab in either mode should be treated, it has the auto-indent you mentioned, reacting to freely definable characters (for example, auto-indent forward after '{' or '(', and back after '}' or ')', respectively). Best of all, it lets you define these parameters independently for plain text, c/c++, java, HTML, Perl, etc., etc., as well as any number of custom syntaxes you may wish to import or define yourself. A small selection of useful features of a great tool. Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Editplus or the company behind it, just a happy user.