[KLUG Members] I want to be the master of tabs

[Dirk Bartley]

On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 20:38, Robert G. Brown wrote:
> On 11 Jul 2003 20:04:33 -0400, Dirk Bartley <bartleyd2@chartermi.net> wrote:
> 
> >man expand
> >man unexpand
> >
> >hmmm
> >
> >I wish those were known by me before I wrote some perl scripts to do 
> >just that.
> Well, it's not bad experience... although it seems like you would
> have foregone the honor of it all! :)
> 
> >Good thought, but I need to do this at the terminal?? level. 
> It doesn't seem like that's the right place to look, at least not these days.
> 
> Tabs are really intreesting anachronisms, in many ways. They were really 
> valuable back in the days of slow serial communication, and when terminals
> (15-45 char/sec) ran on dialup lines and were the only common output 
> devices, so they had to double as plotters, for example. Setting tabs
> and then putting them in the output stream really made stuff like that 
> go faster.
> 
> Now we have real plotters, graphics, and printers that do a far better job
> of rendering then onto paper than the old terminals did. Thus we have not 
> heard a lot about tab control....
>  
> >The debugging program I use is outputting my tabs indented out
> >farther than I would like and I would like to continue to use 
> >tabs instead of spaces.
> Yes, and this is the only really common use of tabs that we see these days.
> I had been wondering a little about just what you were trying to accomplish;
> I set tab stops in whatever source editor I'm using at the moment to get 
> the indentation effect I prefer.Since there's code out there with many
> levels on indentation, setting this every 3 spaces gives me the ability to
> see more, while setting it to 8 is a bit more comfortable and less ambiguous.

I use tabs whenever I am the programmer in control of a program.  They
make looking at the file so much more flexible.  In vi set ts=2 is my
favorite.  It's in my .vimrc file.
>  
> 
> expand and unexpand permit some control, especially if you think of them as
> filters. You can expand your code with the tab settings you like, and when
> you're done debugging, unexpand the files to get the tabs back. Tab all you
> like on input, then expand in the spaces you want to see later. This is gross, 
> perhaps crude control, but it will work. You want to use it sparingly, since 
> you're touching your files, and that will cause make to kick off a lot more
> work than you might like...

Yes, the only issue is that I want to leave the programs with tabs. 
Then when a debug occurs, be able to perform listing commands. 
Expanding and unexpanding works great on the big bugs that involve lots
of time, but not the little bugs.

My method around make is to delete the file and re-update from cvs if I
don't change it.

> 
> However, some debuggers (and most file editors) support ways of changing 
> tab settings, and there's some software that does code reformatting in 
> various ways (I think one of them is clalled "tidy" and another one is 
> called "prettyprint").
> 

Unfortunately I am debugging in unibasic and not C.  
> 							Regards,
> 							---> RGB <---
> 
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-- 
Dirk Bartley <bartleyd2@chartermi.net>