RE: Understanding Emacs and Tabs

[Bingham, Jay]

On: Saturday, May 17, 2003 2:57 PM Kai Großjohann wrote:

>"Bingham, Jay" <Jay.Bingham@hp.com> writes:
>
>> As long as you are including this you might as well also include that
>> M-i will also always insert an actual TAB character.
>
>No, M-i will obey indent-tabs-mode, AFAIK.
>
>In fact, I just tested it, it seems to be the case.
>
>Also, M-i advances to the next tab stop, and if that happens to be at
>a spot that a tab character cannot reach, then M-i will use spaces
>even if indent-tabs-mode is t.

Kai,

Let me first say that I have learned a great deal about Emacs from your posts 
and I have a great deal of respect for you and your opinions.  However I think 
that your response was a bit hasty in this case.
What you say may well be true if one has indent-tabs-mode enabled.  Since I do 
not have indent-tabs-mode enabled in my environment and I suspect that the vast 
majority of the new users of Emacs, toward whom Eric's web page is aimed, will 
not have it enabled either, I believe that my statement will be valid in their 
environments as well.  I have no quick way to verify or refute your statement 
with regard to the operation of M-i when indent-tabs-mode is enabled, since I 
do not have it enabled.  Nor do I care to go to the effort to verify your 
statement since it appears that indent-tabs-mode is an add-in that must be 
intentionally required to even be available (I am running Emacs 21.1 on my PC 
and 20.4 on Unix based machines neither of which has it available), unless of 
course someone inherits it by cloning another user's .emacs.

Regards,
-_
J_)
C_)ingham
.    HP - NonStop Austin Software & Services - Software Quality Assurance
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