Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code

Elastic tabstops for Scintilla

Some time ago I found out that David Kinder was working on adding elastic tabstops to the Windows version of Inform 7, a system for writing text adventure games. The Windows version uses Scintilla as its text editing widget so David set to work on porting my Gedit implementation to Scintilla. With David's blessings I've put the code up on GitHub here.

This is actually fantastic news as there are many text editors on various platforms which use Scintilla (see here and here). Notable examples include Anjuta, Code::Blocks, Geany, Notepad++, Komodo, Programmer's Notepad and SciTE, and hopefully we'll start to see some of these add support for elastic tabstops soon.

By the way, in case any of the developers of those editors are reading this and need to know how to convert text formatted using elastic tabstops to use spaces instead (and vice versa), there's some Python code I wrote which does that here.

Posted on Sunday, 2013-01-20 at 22:45 UTC

1 comments

Tuesday 2013-02-19 10:16 UTC

Kostya <tracklog AT microsoft DOT com>

That's a creative answer to a difficult quesiotn

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