Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code | Hacker News Reader

Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code

nickgravgaard.com

27 pointsusrme6 comments

While this would be nice, I find that the value it adds is very low. I've settled on tabs for indent and spaces for alignment. And over the years I've found that I do less and less alignment and that is is rarely benificial. The biggest problem is that it creates noisy diffs when you add or remove the longest element in a group, and that would be resolved by elastic tabstops. But I also don't see much value in separating the comment from the code by a sea of whitespace. If I have a comment talking about multiple lines of code I just put it in front. If I have a long comment about one line I just let it soft-wrap (or put it in front and use paragraphs).

So yes, these would be nice and would improve my coding experience. But the improvement would be tiny compared to the fight of trying to get everyone to use them.

What if you want to align things which are not grouped together in consecutive lines?

IE:

  doSomething()         // This is a comment
  ...random other things here...
  doSomething2()        // This is another comment, I want aligned with the first

That can be done with tabs/tabs replaced with spaces. I just need to hit tab until it aligns with the same tab boundry. But can elastic tabstops do that?

See also: Intelligent Indentation, Seriously — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31478308

Why "seriously"? I checked it out but was underwhelmed, maybe I just woke up and am missing something?

It's the title of the page.

I'm a big supporter of elastic tab stops (in fact I had the same idea before seeing the original article), and I disagree with the criticisms laid out in "Intelligent indentation" [1].

> Elastic tabstops require editor support, and editor support is lacking

This can change. Inserting multiple spaces when you press "tab" also used to be lacking in most text editors, now it is ubiquitous. We can likewise push for elastic tab stops

> Elastic tabstops cannot adequately represent the code sample above. Under elastic tabstops, there would need to be a tab on the first line....

Not necessarily. The way I envision elastic tab stops is you can configure the IDE to typeset the file exactly how you like it. So you can tell the IDE to align function arguments. Or align `=` signs. And the IDE intelligently parses the code and figures out the correct indentation and alignment for each character. Maybe there's a file where the IDE can't parse it correctly. Ok, just disable intelligent indentation for that file, and it will display it in plain view.

One benefit to this approach is that different people can have different preferences. This is similar to how you can already configure your IDE to change indentation width (if you use tabs for indentation). Just like how one person might like 2-char width indentation while others prefer 4-char width, one person might prefer aligning function arguments while others don't. These can all be configured. And if the user doesn't want to configure, the IDE comes with sane defaults.

[1]: http://intellindent.info/seriously/

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