bug#18548: Emacs whitespace mode

[Kip Coul]

Hi all,

I am a fan of Emacs, and I'd like to bring a minor change but that I
find actually useful.
I'd like to modify the way tabs are displayed in whitespace mode.

Basically what I want to do is the following: display a tab as a
customizable sequence of characters instead of a character followed by
spaces.

So, if a tab takes five spaces, I'd like the user to be able to customize
this, for example to display "<--->" or "---->". You can have a look
here at how they represent tabs, it's very close to what I want to do:
http://www.emacswiki.org/TabsAreEvil#SmartTabs

The user will be able to specify the following characters:
   - char #1, that will be displayed at the beginning
   - char #2, that will be repeated
   - char #3 (optional) that will be put at the end of the tab

So, for a tab to display as "---->", you'd set char #1 = char #2 = '-'
and char #3 = '>', and for a tab to display as "<--->", you'd set char
#1 = '<', char #2 = '-' and char #3 = '>'

So, could you confirm that the file whitespace.el is the one I have to
modify? Could you give me some insight about how to do?

Thanks and regards,
Kip