Re: textedit - how to set tab size for correct column calculation?

[Br. Samuel Springuel]

On 2018-11-03 2:10 PM, David Baptista wrote:
> <tab>c'<other stuff>

For Lilypond the tab is 8 spaces, thus the c' is on columns 9 and 10 
(one column for each character).  Lilypond is not aware of your editor 
settings (which change that result) and thus cannot account for that. 
The "\t" = "        " convention is an old one [1].  There has been a 
trend in recent times to reduce the number of spaces, especially for 
programming languages which use indentation as a meaningful 
representation of nesting level (and have lots of nesting).  Since 
Lilypond doesn't pay attention to indentation (it's merely an aesthetic 
thing to make human reading of the program easier), there probably 
hasn't been much call for breaking the old convention.

Your editor, on the other hand, knows that there is a tab there and that 
it's displaying tabs as 4 spaces.  Clearly if the position it goes to 
when following the textedit link is wrong, then it's taking the column 
number to be the visible column number, not the hypothetical one which 
would result if the tabs were expanded using the old 8 space convention. 
 I don't know if your editor can be told "pretend tabs are 8 spaces 
when computing column numbers but only display them as 4", but that's 
the sort of thing you're asking it to do.

What you can probably do, however, is set the editor to auto-expand tabs 
[2].  In this case, you can press the tab button and things will indent 
normally, but the editor will automatically insert multiple spaces (4, 
given your current settings) instead of tabs.  Thus your line would become:

> <space><space><space><space>c'<other stuff>

In this case a space is a single column character and Lilypond and your 
editor will agree that c' is in columns 5 and 6.  No issues with how 
many spaces in a tab to deal with.

[1] https://superuser.com/a/355868
[2] I see you use Notepad++ so https://stackoverflow.com/a/7471232

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Br. Samuel, OSB
(R. Padraic Springuel)
St. Anselm’s Abbey
4501 South Dakota Ave, NE
Washington, DC, 20017
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