Kate replaces alignment spaces by tabs

Question

When indenting a block of code in Kate (3.11.2), spaces used for alignment are replaced by tabs, ruining all alignments and putting me in the hell of restoring all these spaces.

Example:

if (true)
{
—→$foo = 'bar'.
—→•••••••'baz';
}

(—→ are tabs, • spaces)

I indent using two characters wide tabs. The problem is when I select these lines and press the Tab key to add an indentation level: it replaces groups of two spaces by one tab:

—→if (true)
—→{
—→—→$foo = 'bar'.
—→—→—→—→—→'baz';
—→}

Removing the last (odd) space. This is wrong since tabs width is undefined and must be able to vary without breaking the code presentation.

In my settings (Editor Component → Editing → Indentation), I set Indent using on Tabulators and Spaces but it doesn't save it and returns immediately on Tabulators.

Is it a bug? Or is my Kate misconfigured?

Answer 1

Being a Kate developer, the answer is as follows:

Kate's indentation system supports the concept of indentation and alignment:

Alternatively, an array of two elements can be returned:

   return [ indent, align ];

In this case, the first element is the indentation depth as above with the same meaning of the special values. However, the second element is an absolute value representing a column for "alignment". If this value is higher than the indent value, the difference represents a number of spaces to be added after the indentation of the first parameter. Otherwise, the second number is ignored. Using tabs and spaces for indentation is often referred to as "mixed mode".

So theoretically it works. However, in practice the "C Style" indenter and most other indenters do not support this. Instead, they just return the indentation level without distinguishing indentation from alignment.

In other words: The feature you want is not implemented.

The good news is that all these indenters are written in JavaScript and can therefore be changed very easily. Contributions are always welcome at [email protected]. So if you are interested in working on this, please contact us!