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From Eclipse Corner: Java Editor feature requests Finally, it would be nice to have a "convert all tabs to spaces" option. Given the two problems above, it's much easier to tab to the right place than to hold down the space bar, but our convention (sensible, I think) is to use spaces instead of tabs in our source files. I'd rather not mess that up :) NOTES:
moved to 'active'
PRODUCT VERSION: R0.9
The feature I would like to see is a setting where tabs are tabs during editing but when the file is saved to disk all tabs are converted to spaces. An related option (separately settable) would be to automatically convert leading spaces to tabs when a file is loaded. This behavior allows you to keep the benefits of tabs during editing but avoids the troubles that often occur when they appear in the repository/library system used by the team.
we need a consistent story for how to handle the different TAB related feature requests.
Mike, why would you want to edit with tabs if you want spaces? If there was an option to insert spaces for each tab being hit, wouldn't that be enough? Conversion of tabs <-> spaces on save and loading should be part of the encoding story, or at least use the same mechanism. For now, I see two important feature requests (in this order): 1) option to insert spaces when a tab is hit 2) action to convert all tabs to spaces or vice versa (similar to code format action)
------- Additional Comments from John Verhaeg (mailto:JVerhaeg@MetaMatrix.Com) - ------ I agree with Mike's comment: "The feature I would like to see is a setting where tabs are tabs during editing but when the file is saved to disk all tabs are converted to spaces. An related option (separately settable) would be to automatically convert leading spaces to tabs when a file is loaded. This behavior allows you to keep the benefits of tabs during editing but avoids the troubles that often occur when they appear in the repository/library system used by the team." This benefit I see is that you would be able to cursor over tabs within the editor quickly, e.g., if tabs were set to 4, and a pair of tokens were separated by 16 "spaces", it would only take 4 keystrokes to move from one token to the other.
option to insert tabs for spaces is in the current stream. converting all tabs to spaces is supported by the code formatter
