"Smart" Block Copy & Paste

[Tim Hochberg]

Steve Lamb wrote:
> On 2003-10-14, Tim Hochberg <tim.hochberg at ieee.org> wrote:
> 
>>During the recent, massive, painful Lisp-Python crossposting thread the 
>>evils of Python's whitespace based indentation were once again brought 
>>to light. Since Python' syntax is so incredibly brittle, and failure 
>>prone, it's amazing that we don't have more editor support for our 
>>feeble minds.
> 
>    
>     Why, exactly, would we need more than << and >>?  

I assume that's block dedent and indent? You don't, really, need more 
than that.

However, many editors tend to mess up the indentation on the first line 
of a pasted block, which as to be corrected separately from the rest. 
You can usually avoid this if your careful or hit home/ctrl-a/etc before 
pasting, but that's extra keystrokes. Also, at least some editors 
(SciTe, Idle) don't set the mark on your pasted text, so then you need 
to select the pasted text before (in)|(de)denting it.

Of course what I did was probably massively overkill for these problems, 
but it's an interesting project. Also, the behaviour of Idle with the 
patch is overall better than without, IMO. In truth, I suspect that I 
could get a similar gain with less invasive and simpler changes, but it 
wouldn't be as intersting.

Regards,

-tim