Re: Cream Tabstop customization
Cream is a free, easy-to-use configuration of the Vim text editor
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From: Steve H. <dig...@mi...> - 2004-03-14 22:11:29
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From: Walter Mundt, Mar 14, 2004 1:03 AM > > I'm an experienced vim user who's been trying out Cream for a few > weeks now. For the most part I like it a lot. > > However, I've run into a few minor issues that bother me. > > First: there's no way to tell Cream to leave tab settings alone! I > personally found the ability to have a different setting for > shiftwidth/softtabstop and tabstop to be one of vim's most useful > and endearing features when I started learning it. I wish more > editors had a similar capability. It lets me maintain a standard > tabstop width that 95% of programs use by default without being > forced to use that width for my indenting as well. Please help me understand this last sentence. Are you saying: 1. You want *your* editing to use different indention depths than the rest of the document (by others)? or 2. Tab characters (dec 9) should be allowed to appear at one interval but selecting text and pressing the Tab key should shove it over at an (optionally) different interval. or something else? > When I installed Cream, I found to my dismay that there's no way for > this to happen. Setting things up in cream-user.vim or > cream-conf.vim doesn't matter because everything will be normalized > to be equal to g:CREAM_TABSTOP anyway. > > My current solutios is simply to comment out all code in cream-lib > that actually propagates the CREAM_TABSTOP setting into the real vim > configuration. If there's any interest I could try and write up a > patch to create some relevant cream-conf setting(s). It wouldn't be too difficult to provide an option for this, but I need to understand why in the first place. It's my opinion that a Tab is a Tab is a Tab, and if one chooses to substitute them with spaces then an option to insert spaces when the Tab key is used is reasonable. But I've never understood why a text/ascii document might use different values for tab and indent, especially if they are not multiples (Tab 8, indent 3). What happens when you give it to someone using Notepad? > My other issue is that the Find/Replace dialogs are worse than > useless. While this doesn't affect me much as I can just do "ctrl-L > /", I would definitely have abandoned vim if it presented me with > something so unfriendly to begin with. We had a thread on this topic just a short while ago. Please read back... I'm not thrilled about them either, but see them as a necessary evil. > I don't know if there's anything you can do about it, but "find" > should _not_ be a multi-step operation. If I were to expect cream to > act like other editors I'm familiar with, typing "ctrl-F searchterms > ENTER" should do it. No having to tab over to the "OK" button or > reach for the mouse. No having approve a second "overview" dialog > every single time I want to do a search. Having a mouse-accessible > GUI interface is great, but (for a text editor more than anything) > not if it gets in the way of keyboard-based operation. You didn't say, but I'm guessing you're using a GTK2 interface, in which case the dialogs (including focus) are horribly broken. (Although recent patches (somewhere around 6.2.300) are improving this.) About the only thing I'd add to our previous arguments about this topic is that if you know C, and want to do our project a *huge* favor (and earn yourself $50US, courtesy of me) write a patch against the current Vim that either: 1. Fixes the :promptfind and :promptrepl dialog to allow preset and return of the checkbox statuses and input strings for manipulation prior to doing the actual find/substitution. A checkbox for regular expressions also needs to be added. 2. Enables more options in dialog boxes via Vim script. The current dialogs option only the display string and the button count and titles. Wouldn't it be great if we could also present multiple input boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons and list boxes? Throw in tabbed leaves and combo boxes and you'd have perfect. I realize both of these are kitchen sink in scope and nearly antithetical to Vim's underlying philosophy, but any good text editor requires decent widgets and we're hamstrung by these limitations. (I won't comment on the existing :promptfind and :promptrepl dialogs since the previous thread pretty much sums up my feelings about the regexp limitation they impose.) > I think you've got a really good idea here, and despite the above > flaws I think I'll find myself transitioning over to Cream from my > current vim/xterm setup. I'm glad you like it. Cream is just a hobby of mine, an effort to get a good, Free text editor for both the operating systems I use daily. While there are plenty of big improvements I'd love to make, life at the moment prevents me from exploring host source code patches, an area we could use to "fix" things... but I'll need help. ;) -- Steve Hall [ dig...@mi... ] Cream... the Vim text editor in sheep's clothing! http://cream.sourceforge.net |