Emacs auto-modes and tabs

[Kevin D. Clark]

Jason Stephenson <jason at sigio.com> writes:

> If you're feeling particularly bold, you could hack the elisp source
> files for the modes on your system so that everything goes to tabs
> instead of spaces. They seem to be under /usr/share/emacs on my RH
> 8.0 system.

You're a smart guy; I'm sure you can see why this would be a pretty
horrible thing to do.

> > (not to start a flamewar or anything, but you do know that inserting
> > real tabs in certain files (i.e. source code files) is frowned upon
> > (by some people) right?)
> 
> Please, let's not get that started. I like spaces, other folks like
> tabs. That's why I use Emacs. Switching from one to the other is a
> keystroke away.

Yes, but "switching from one to the other" involves modifying code,
and this has bad ramifications if you're working in an environment
with source control (or even if you're just working with diffs).

Also, there's another issue, illustrated by the following scenerio:
programmer A wants tabs in his source file, but he wants his editor to
display these tabs as 3 spaces.  Programmer A writes a bunch of code.
Programmer B wants spaces to be in his source files, and wants tabs
displayed as tab stops.  Programmer B looks at Programmer A's source
files and has a difficult time reading them, since Programmer A has
intermixed spaces and tabs in his indentation (which is common
enough). 

Bleh...

--kevin
-- 
Kevin D. Clark (kclark at CetaceanNetworks.com)
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