Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: tabs in vi
Message-ID: <9347@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 24 Aug 89 18:40:22 GMT
References: <7901@ardent.UUCP> <36790001@hpindwa.HP.COM> <2068@marvin.Solbourne.COM> <242@quad.uucp>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 28

In article <242@quad.uucp> dts@quad.uucp (David T. Sandberg) writes:

>Right, but I'm fairly certain that the idea was to end up with no
>tabs in the file.  I recently ran into a situation where this would
>have been helpful; I had a text file which I wanted to edit mostly
>with vi, but also wanted to load into Uniplex on occasion.  Editing
>the file without using the tabstops was bordering on ridiculous, and
>even if the system had featured an "expand", I wouldn't have wanted
>to run the file through the filter several times a day.

What's wrong with:
pr -t -e
 to expand the tabs to the positions you want? (perhaps this is why
you don't have expand...)

My sysVr3.2 manual page for pr shows options also for
-eck  for expansion
  where c is the optional tab character
  and k is an optional digit for the size of a tabstop (default=8)
-ick  for the opposite i.e. replace spaces w/tabs where possible.

>Unfortunately, I arrived at the conclusion that there was no really
>good way to accomplish this.

Unfortunately the permuted index does not show tabs as being related
to the pr command (AT&T SvsVr3.2 for '386).

Les Mikesell