Re: [Alphacocoa-devel] Questions about the C Mode

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

On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 8:12 PM Bernard Desgraupes <bde...@or...>
wrote:
>
> Hi César,
>
> thank you for your message.

Thanks a lot for your prompt reply, Bernard!!

> [...]
> This is not supported at the moment but should be easy to implement. I’ll
try to assemble something and will post the code.
> If I understand correctly, when you press the right arrow for instance
and there are four spaces, you want the cursor to immediately jump four
positions to the right.

Actually, I'm not sure how other editors do it, because I have always used
true tabs in my code. I want to change to spaces now, given how strong the
general advice is about this. I know that some editors have a key
combination (such as Ctrl, Opt, or other) which when combined with the
cursor keys, jump to the next non-whitespace character in the line.
However, I feel that's not natural. I mean, this should work without any
key combination, because every coder uses tabs (the only difference is that
you emulate tabs with spaces, but in your mind you are using tabs, so the
natural behaviour should be exactly the same as if they were true tabs).
However, I don't know how other editors do this. It would be interesting to
take a look at vim, emacs, or other editors out there for seeing how they
do that.

> [...]
> For instance if you want to bind function::next to Opt-Ctrl-N  and
function::prev to Opt-Ctrl-P, put the following instructions in your file
CPrefs.tcl (select Alpha ↣ C Mode Setup ↣ Edit Prefs File to open it)
>     binding create -tag C {oz 'N'} function::next
>     binding create -tag C {oz 'P'} function::prev
>
> Then after relaunching Alpha, the key combos will work as expected when
you are in C mode.

Hmm... it seems function::next and function::prev have a weird behaviour in
C mode: If I have a /* */ comment made of several lines, the function::next
and prev jump to such comment lines in addition to function definitions...
it's definitely something unexpected going on there...

> [...]
> Usually in Alpha, this kind of thing is achieved by
Shift-Command-Double-Click but I think this is not implemented in the C
modes. I’ll see if it is feasible.

Ok, keep me informed. Anyway, the usefulness of such a feature is most of
the time across-files (I mean, you are working in a C file where a function
is called, but however the function is defined in another C file in your
Fileset... I don't know if Alpha supports looking for marks from another
file because I just started using it today and I'm a novice). However,
sometimes you are working in a large C file (imagine the Nuklear UI source,
for example), and in that scenario finding a mark in the same file would be
very useful too.

> [...]
> If you Option-Click in the toolbar or titlebar of a document window,
you’ll see a popover with the list of all the sibling files. Double-click
in the popover on the file you want to edit.

This only lists the siblings, but, however, I'm getting used to the Windows
menu, from where you can also switch windows reasonably quickly. Anyway, I
believe that a Fileset combo (having all the files in the Fileset) would be
very convenient, especially considering that there's a lot of empty space
in the windows toolbar.

Thanks a lot for all your comments, Bernard!

Kind regards,

César