rusty@sdcarl.UUCP (rusty c. wright) (07/05/85)
Somebody (from the Berkeley area) sent me a response to my
gripes about c-mode in gnu emacs, and either i screwed up
or the mail program screwed up and i lost their reply. could
they please resend their reply? thanks a bunch.
--
rusty c. wright
{ucbvax,ihnp4,akgua,hplabs,sdcsvax}!sdcarl!rustyrusty@sdcarl.UUCP (rusty c. wright) (07/15/85)
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: <220@sdcarl.UUCP> Organization: The Royal Inst. of Techn., Stockholm In article <220@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
z@masscomp.UUCP (Steve Zimmerman) (07/19/85)
A tab in C mode in CCA EMACS has always indented the line to the current 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