[Alphacocoa-devel] Questions about the C Mode

[Ces V. <ces...@gm...>]

Hi!

First of all, thanks a lot for the development of this editor!! It seems to
be very powerful, but however it's mostly unknown... I encourage you to
announce it more, so that more users are aware of it!

My interest is for C programming (the vast majority of files I edit are C
files). After trying how to do some things in Alpha, I got some questions
that either are not documented, or I wasn't able to find the proper place
at the documentation:

- If you indent using spaces instead of tabs (as usually recommended when
writing C code), can I use the cursor keys in a way that they detect
contiguous spaces as tabs, for easier navigation? I mean, can I make the
cursor keys behave like if I was using tabs instead of spaces?

- Is it possible to jump to the previous/next mark in the file, from where
the cursor is located? When I edit C files, it's very convenient to jump to
the next function/struct/definition/etc, or to the previous one. When using
the C mode, there are two little buttons that let me navigate to marks by
their name, but I found no option for jumping to the next or to the
previous one.

- Is it possible to jump to the mark of a function definition if you click
on a call to such function? For example, I tried to select the function
name, and I right-clicked hoping I would get an option for jumping to the
mark where the function is defined, but however the contextual menu didn't
have that option.

- This seems to be a dumb question, but I couldn't find any documentation:
The tab key doesn't work even in plain text mode (I assume that in the C
mode this is done to enforce the indentation style, but, however, in plain
text mode I'd expect to be able to indent freely... why is the tab key
disabled? Is there some preference for enabling it?

- Also, the automatic indentation in the C mode favours one style, but
you'll know that there are different styles for C indentation and brace
locations... for this reason I found it difficult to get used to the
automatic indentation of the C mode... can I disable it? (I tried, but
there are several options in the C mode that are not documented and also
have a weird setting -such as code0, fixed0, etc-, and I didn't know how to
proceed).

- Can I put a Fileset combobox in the window toolbar, for easily moving
from one file to another one? There's the windows menu and the fileset
menu, but it's not as convenient as having a quick combo for quickly
choosing files...

- Ah, finally something that looks like a bug: It seems the Matlab mode
robbed the ".m" suffix :-D so when you open the help for the Objective-C
mode and you click on the example file, it's opened in Matlab mode, and you
are told to be in the Matlab example (but it's actually the Objective-C
example file=

I'm sorry to ask so many questions, but I couldn't find them in the
documentation.

Kind regards, and thanks a lot!

César