[Pythonmac-SIG] Selecting in BBEdit & Python Indenting style (spaces)

[Louis Pecora]

Chris Barker asked:

>Side note: does anyone know how to do selection, cut and paste by 
columns in BBEdit?

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You hold down the option key while selecting, but you cannot do this in the soft wrap mode.  You have to set the window to hard wrap at some column number.  If you have the BBEdit manual, you can find more info around page 52 or just look in the index.

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Now that I answered your question, you can answer mine.  :-)  Or others can chime in as I suspect they will (which is good).

You state about the incompatibility of the Python indenting scheme and some editors (E.g BBEdit):

>Yes, it is, but it really doesn't do python indenting quite right. These 
>days, all python code really should be indented with 4 spaces, and while 
>you can set BBedit to put in 4 spaces when you hit the tab key, it 
>doesn't recognize those four spaces as a single level of indentation 
>when you want to delete them, requiring four hits of the backspace key.

>One would think that this is a minor annoyance, and perhaps it is, but 
>being used to the excellent [X]emacs python mode, I find it very 
>frustrating.


I gotta ask (I am not a Python expert or Pythonista):  

What the heck were they (Guido?) thinking when they used 4 spaces as the one true mode of indentation for Python?  

I would think that TAB would be infinitely better and avoid the problems you point out that probably plague a lot of editors when doing Python code.  And many editors allow you to set the size of the TAB (e.g. 2 spaces in size if you think 4 looks too large -- I do).  Then one delete and remove the indent no matter what the TAB size.  The four spaces approach sounds like an accident waiting to happen.  Not to mention completely baffling to newbies or even those of us who have hung around it for a while.



-- 
Cheers,

Lou Pecora

Code 6362
Naval Research Lab
Washington, DC  20375
USA
Ph:  +202-767-6002
email:  pecora at anvil.nrl.navy.mil