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In JBuilder, the Tab key does not insert \t, it recenters the current line (or when there is a selection, it recenters all the lines in the selection). JBuilder also puts a message in the editor footer: "Line automatically indented". I think NetBeans should do the same. Then it needs a different key to insert a literal \t. I think the editor footer message could tell the user what it is: "Line automatically indented. Press Alt+t to insert a Tab character." See also the thread on nbusers, subject "indentation setup", from January 2003. There are a couple of objections to this. But instead of continuing a discussion there, I'm filing an issue such that the ui folks can evaluate this.
This ui problem (tab key doing the wrong thing) drives me nuts and keeps sending me back to emacs. But this week I've decided to "fly our own airplanes", so I wrote a patch to implement this issue. I'll attach it.
Created an attachment (id=9669) [details] Simple patch which implements the requested behavior
Description of the patch: it creates a new ReindentLineAction, which it registers and binds to the Tab key. (It also changes the old insert-tab action to be bound to Control-Q [tab], as well as a commented out version of Meta-i, which are emacs bindings for it. I'm not sure what the non-emacs binding for tab should be - check JBuilder I guess.) The implementation is very straightforward - it just a copy of the code in FormatAction, but modified in two ways: - instead of using the selection begin and end points for formatting, it uses the current line - instead of moving the caret to the beginning of the line, it moves the caret to the first non-whitespace character on the line
Eeek, how about having hitting tab insert a tab or replace the current selection with a tab???? I really don't like weird behaviours bound to (unmodified) keys. The behaviour of hitting tab while having a selection in the middle of a line NOT replacing the selection is already annoying enough.
My point (which I made in the nbusers discussion, perhaps not in this issue report) is that tying the Tab key to indentation is not weird. Not all non-modifier keys perform self-insert; the function keys for example. JBuilder, long the market leading Java IDE, does exactly this. As does Emacs. Besides, \t's in the source code leads to various problems since the Java coding style calls for 4-space indentation, and tabs often default to 8 chars (cvs diff, vi, etc.) I'm not against allowing Tab to insert \t's, but it should be a non-default option. I believe more users will benefit from IDE managed indentation than doing on their own using Tabs.
Two points here: - indention is rather broken for multiline statements, binding tab to indention would be suprising and annoying for this reason - appreciation of this is one of those things which really depends on your background (emacs vs vi vs visual studio)
*** Issue 14285 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
Please fix this. I'd expect that most users want the line to be properly aligned instead of adding a new tab. Certainly true in my case. Thanks, Dmitri
Created an attachment (id=26656) [details] Patch migrated to NetBeans 5.0
Tor's patch refined and applied. The new action is bound to tab only in Emacs keymap. C-q <tab> inserts \t. Also works on selection. I also found a bug 68575. Will fix separately IDE:------------------------------------------------- IDE: [11/11/05 11:10 PM] Committing Files started Checking in editor/libsrc/org/netbeans/editor/BaseKit.java; /cvs/editor/libsrc/org/netbeans/editor/BaseKit.java,v <-- BaseKit.java new revision: 1.141; previous revision: 1.140 done Checking in editor/libsrc/org/netbeans/editor/ActionFactory.java; /cvs/editor/libsrc/org/netbeans/editor/ActionFactory.java,v <-- ActionFactory.java new revision: 1.71; previous revision: 1.70 done Checking in editor/libsrc/org/netbeans/editor/Bundle.properties; /cvs/editor/libsrc/org/netbeans/editor/Bundle.properties,v <-- Bundle.properties new revision: 1.65; previous revision: 1.64 done Checking in ide/defaults/src/org/netbeans/modules/defaults/Emacs-keybindings.xml; /cvs/ide/defaults/src/org/netbeans/modules/defaults/Emacs-keybindings.xml,v <-- Emacs-keybindings.xml new revision: 1.11; previous revision: 1.10 done IDE: [11/11/05 11:10 PM] Committing Files finished
marked as fixed
