Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code

Open-sourcing Always Aligned VS, and releasing Elastic Notepad

I should have written a post about this months ago, but I've been busy with other things. I've released two projects on GitHub which you should know about.

Always Aligned VS

Earlier in the year I started getting emails from users telling me my elastic tabstops plugin for Visual Studio, Always Aligned VS, wasn't working with the latest version (VS 2017). I worked on the code a bit at the end of August to make it work with VS 2017, and made a new release. At the same time I decided that since I don't use Windows much these days, I would release the code as open source so its users can help maintain future versions. You can find the code on GitHub.

Elastic Notepad

In November 2016 I started working on a new demo app written in Scala to replace the old Java one. Java had made sense for the original since it needed to work as an applet which was a good way of demoing the idea back in 2006, and I didn't know about Scala, which was only a couple of years old. Since then I've discovered Scala and I've been keen to reimplement elastic tabstops in a functional and immutable style. I'm very happy with how the core elastic tabstops code turned out, which now also includes code for converting between elastic and non-elastic formats. This code should serve as the main reference implementation of elastic tabstops from now on. Since it can now load and save files I started to think of this as a proper little cross-platform text-editor in its own right, so I've added some more functionality like toggling between formats, configuration, and undo/redo too. I made the first proper release last month, and you can find the main Elastic Notepad repo here.

Posted on Saturday, 2017-11-18 at 18:19 UTC