Re: [Docutils-develop] Emacs ‘electric-indent-mode’ versus ‘rst-mode’

[Laura C. <la...@op...>]

In a message of Sun, 04 Oct 2015 20:59:33 +0200, Stefan Merten writes:
>Hi Ben!
>
>Today Ben Finney wrote:
>> It would be great if ‘electric-indent-mode’ and ‘rst-mode’ could both be
>> active together and work sensibly.
>
>Frankly I don't know much about `electric-indent-mode`.
>
>The problem is that `electric-indent-mode` assumes something probably
>called a deterministic indentation. This does not work for
>reStructuredText.
>
>Apart from that I have no idea what any electricity could do better
>than `rst-mode` does already. Indentation in `rst-mode` is already
>very useful and usually does what you want.
>
>>> The problem with `electric-indent-mode' has been fixed in the Emacs
>>> tree already.
>> 
>> What resolution was chosen? 
>
>The Emacs people did what they do in such cases::
>
>  ;; Indentation is not deterministic.
>  (setq electric-indent-inhibit t)

I think that is what rst-mode.el needs to do if it doesn't already.
If your only problem is with editing ReStructured Text, this will
fix things for you.

But I had a more comprehensive problem, the day this happened.
editing ReST didn't work.  Writing Python and Haskell didn't work.
And, most importantly, cutting and pasting text from one window
to an emacs session running on another machine did not work.

I was told I needed to do:
(add-hook 'after-change-major-mode-hook (lambda() (electric-indent-mode -1)))

And that got most, but not all of my problem.

But I finally got the thing to stop biting me with:
(electric-indent-mode 0)

which is the way to brutally turn it off altogether.  I figured that if
I ever found a case where it would be useful, I would just write a hook
to enable it for whenever that was.

It's been a long time now, and so far I haven't managed to want it once.

I chalk it up to 'takes all kinds to make a world' ...

Laura