Tabbing/Spaces

[Fredrik Lundh]

Terry Hancock wrote:
> This is entirely understandable, but it's a lot easier to use tabs
> when writing (and I really wish it was set to 4 spaces myself).

Depends on your editor, of course.

Real editors don't necessarily insert a tab character
everytime you press the tab key...

> But surely there's a simple way to please both -- aren't
> there de-tabbing filters I can use to substitute spaces for tabs
> (or vice-versa)?  What _I_ find really irritating is that my code
> usually winds up being a mixture of the two.

I'm pretty sure your editor can do it for you (I'll leave
it to the vim gurus to explain how).

here's a piece of code I use for emacs (taken from a
java mode sample by jwz):

;; normalize whitespace on the way out
(defun python-mode-untabify ()
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (while (re-search-forward "[ \t]+$" nil t)
      (delete-region (match-beginning 0) (match-end 0)))
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (if (search-forward "\t" nil t)
        (untabify (1- (point)) (point-max))))
  nil)
 (add-hook 'python-mode-hook
          '(lambda ()
             (make-local-variable 'write-contents-hooks)
             (add-hook 'write-contents-hooks 'python-mode-untabify)))

Cheers /F