[Nano-devel] Feature Request/patch for visual converting whitespace

[Mike Frysinger]

i dont know if anyone has suggested/requested this before (i browsed the last 
2 years of e-mails and didnt see any references ...), but i've always liked 
being able to tell visually the difference between tabs and spaces ...

sometimes people will utilize 4 spaces instead of tabs in projects i work on 
and rather than flipping through the code by hitting the arrows keys, i'd 
like to pick out tabs quickly ... the same goes for trailing whitespace ...

i've included a small patch i whipped together ... its the first time i've 
touched the nano code so i'm sure i missed something ...

basically it adds 2 new keywords to nanorc, 'tabconvert' and 'spaceconvert ... 
it accepts either the ascii value (given as an integer) or a single 
character.  when you run nano, the tabs/spaces will be convereted to display 
the specified characters ...
example:
.nanorc:
set tabconvert 187    # pretty font-dependent values ...
set spaceconvert 183
nano display:
src_install()·{
»   doins·${S}/src/AtlasPalette·||·die  
»   egamesinstall·||·die
the dots are spaces while the >> character is a tab ...

shortcomings (and why i'm posting this ... if people dont like it i probably 
wont fill out the possible extensions since the current patch suits me):
- you can only set via nanorc (no cmdline control/on the fly toggle)
    i looked into adding a meta toggle, but it seems that nano has hit a
    roadblock for adding new toggles ... it uses a bitmask field on a 32 bit
    integer ... 32 toggles already exist thus unless the way toggles are
    handled, nano won't have anymore toggles ?
- only converts tabs/spaces (doesnt do newline characters)
-mike

1.2.2-wsconvert.patch
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