c-mode in gnu emacs
rusty c. wright
From kuling!ihnp4!okstate!andersa Mon Jul 15 07:16:44 1985
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 85 22:21:22 -0200
From: ihnp4!kuling!andersa
To: sdcarl!rusty
Subject: Re: Tabbing in C Mode (Gnu Emacs)
In-Reply-To: <2...@sdcarl.UUCP>
Organization: The Royal Inst. of Techn., Stockholm
In article <2...@sdcarl.UUCP> you write:
>That's STUPID! Why in the world should anybody have to type ctl-q in
>front of a tab everywhere else when they don't have to when they're
>at the beginning of a line. It's a COMPLETELY MORONIC concept.
I don't agree. TAB rather often seems to be bound to some function
other than ^R Self Insert, for instance to perform mode-dependent
indenting, and therefore you can't be sure you'll get a true (space
mod 8) unless you use the ^R Quoted Insert facility.
Thank you for listening,
Anders Andersson
...!seismo!mcvax!enea!kuling!andersa
i must be totally hidebound on this issue. it's probably because all
my life on computers the tab key has always inserted a tab in my file
and moved the cursor over to the next tab stop. also, as an
experiment, i decided to switch over to emacs (from vi) when gnu emacs
came out. so all of my experience with a text editor has been with
vi. i suspect that a big part of the problem is psychological on the
part of emacs users; you are used to having an inferior relationship
with the tab key. naturally one wants an indent-line-according-to-mode
command, but i'm not sure if it should be bound to the tab key.
perhaps it should be bound to m-tab (esc tab) or ctl-x tab. or, even
better, it should run indent-line-according-to-mode when dot is at the
beginning of the line (or when there are only spaces to the left of
it) but everywhere else it should run self-insert-command of a tab. i
think that would be the best solution. you poor emacs users have been
brain- washed into thinking that the wonky behavior of the tab key is
acceptable.
i'm forever aggravated by software that has wired into it some half-
baked way of doing something; probably because the programmer was too
lazy to expend the extra effort to do it right. this is why my
posting to netnews was done in such a hysterical manner. i'm hoping
that someone out there will wake up and see that users shouldn't have
to put shackles on in order to use some software. i guess maybe it
was ok back when people were programming in assembly language (or
teco), but nowadays it's not.
--
rusty c. wright
{ucbvax,ihnp4,akgua,hplabs,sdcsvax}!sdcarl!rusty
Steve Zimmerman
level when used at the beginning of a line, and inserted a tab when used
anywhere else. I've never had any complaints on this behavior, and I
think this is a good standard to follow.
Steve Zimmerman
Masscomp