Re: Tabs and Spaces

[Chris Gordon-Smith]

Pascal J. Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> use.address@my.homepage.invalid (Chris Gordon-Smith) writes:
> 
>> Hello All
>>
>> I have recenly started using emacs for programming, after years using 
>> KDevelop. One problem I have is indenting code. I have my own indentation 
>> style. and ideally I would like to setup emacs to support it automatically. 
>> However, in the short term I'll settle for having emacs convert a TAB 
>> keypress into the correct number of spaces to fill whitespace up to the 
>> next tabstop.
>>
>> At the moment I have
>>
>> (global-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command) 
>>
>> in my .emacs to force insertion of a tab, but I have to keep invoking 
>> untabify manually (otherwise my code looks misaligned when I upload it to 
>> Google Code).
>>
>> Can anyone help.
> 
> You shouldn't insert TAB, this is very bad.  At the very least, you
> may compute the number of spaces you need to insert and insert them
> rather.
Yes, that's what I would like to do. Can you suggest how to do this. Do I 
need to put something in my .emacs file. What would it look like?

> 
> But depending on the language you use, a different mode will be used
> to edit your source and each mode may provide its own indenting rules.
> 
> In the case of Lisp, you may add a indent-function property to the
> plist of the operator name.
> 
> In the case of C, you may customize the variable: c-offsets-alist. See
> also: c-style-alist ; perhaps there's already a style defined that
> you'll like.
> 
>