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Created attachment 244741 [details] Indentation guides for Eclipse IDE One feature that Sublime editor (and others) does well is showing indentation guidelines regardless if one is using spaces or tabs. Currently I am mimicking this behaviour by using tabs and having the 'Show whitespace characters' selected. However in the current team I am with 'spaces' are used for indentation. If I set my Eclipse to use spaces for indentation this makes it hard to distinguish the 'column' I am in because of course spaces based indentation are now rendered as a line of '....' instead of a single '>>' characters. So I propose to implement smart guidelines as shown in the image or minimally allow to allow to display 4 spaces as a single tab character. For better or worse, there also seems to be a trend towards spaces as indentation anyhow and Eclipse IDE could use good visual indentation display.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 84878 ***
This is not a duplicate, the bug 84878 is for language construct aware guidelines - this submission is displaying simple indentation guides based on your indentation settings.
In a similar fashion as provided by http://atlanto.github.io/IndentGuide/ but built into to the editor.
I've been using the mentioned plugin and it works rather well - perhaps it can be just merged in.
(In reply to Daniel Sokolowski from comment #4) > I've been using the mentioned plugin and it works rather well - perhaps it > can be just merged in. The link from comment 3 doesn't work for me.
Old repository is not available anymore. There is working fork of this project: https://github.com/sschaef/IndentGuide
A very simple workaround for some is to change the character representing tabs from the » character to the │ character. It's origin dates back to the MS-DOS era so the │ BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT VERTICAL (\u2502) character is widely supported. Also, the ┃ BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY VERTICAL (\u2503), the ┆ BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT TRIPLE DASH VERTICAL (\u2506), the ┇ BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY TRIPLE DASH VERTICAL (\u2507), the ┊ BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT QUADRUPLE DASH VERTICAL (\u250A), the ┋ BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY QUADRUPLE DASH VERTICAL (\u250B), the ╎ BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT DOUBLE DASH VERTICAL (\u254E), the ╏ BOX DRAWINGS HEAVY DOUBLE DASH VERTICAL (\u254F) and finally the ║ BOX DRAWINGS DOUBLE VERTICAL (\u2551) character could also be options. The class which decides which characters are used to display whitespace is org.eclipse.jface.text.WhitespaceCharacterPainter.
