Re: How do I stop Alpha indenting things?

[Rowland M. <row...@ph...>]

At 5:05 am -0600 29/4/03, Vince Darley wrote:
>Unclick 'Electric Return' in your Config->Preferences->Interface
>Preferences dialog ("Electrics" page).

That doesn't do the job.  It turns out - now I've got this pointer on
roughly what to do - that there's a similar setting in the LaTeX mode
preferences which seems to over-ride the general setting.  Whatever, you
need the LaTeX  mode setting for Electric Return off in this case.  Having
this documented would be nice - the section of the Alpha manual on
indentation doesn't tell you how to turn it off.

>While you say this is "never appropriate", since I can't recall *anyone*
>complaining about this in TeX, HTML modes in the last few years, I think
>you'll find your definition of "appropriate" is not the same as most Alpha
>users.

I think most Alpha users would agree that what *I* see is unhelpful.
Whether Alpha works the same way for them is another matter - but there
ain't no way that what Alpha does in the line of auto-indentation to *me*
can be considered appropriate (one can argue the toss about LaTeX
environment indenting, but that's a separate setting entirely).

>It might be helpful if you gave an example of what you consider to be
>"never appropriate", rather than assuming everyone else shares your
>perspective.

I don't assume that because I have no idea what happens to anyone else
using Alpha.  I was simply reporting *my* experiences and I thought I took
care to ensure I wasn't even implying anything about what anyone else might
think of their experiences with Alpha.

*My* experience - and that's all I'm talking about - is that every time
Alpha does auto-indenting when I'm editing a LaTeX document (and mostly
when I'm editing an html document but I don't do much of that so I can
recall less detail), it's wrong; what's wrong is described next sentence.
I don't know how Alpha works out what to do, but what I usually get when
auto-indent kicks in is either a line that's got indentation when it
shouldn't have, or what tends to look like about twice the appropriate
indentation.  Something's wrong, I don't know what, I can't fix it, and I'm
very happy with auto-indent off.

I could have provided an example, but I couldn't see any point - all I
wanted was information on how to turn this behaviour off.  It's clearly
been designed in to Alpha deliberately for someone's benefit - someone
finds it useful, and it might well be one of those things that's wonderful
if you know how to use it as it was meant to be used.  I don't know how to
use the auto-indentation feature as it was meant to be used (I can tell
that because it always screws up here), help doesn't help, so why not just
turn it off?

If someone's interested in *why* I want it turned off with a view to
sorting out the unhelpful auto-indentation problem I get, that's a
different matter entirely - but I assumed that no-one had any interest in
that on the grounds that other people seem to like auto-indentation.

[snip]

Ta
Rowland.