Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!sys.uea!jrk
From: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Need Help! Tabs 'n TextEdit
Message-ID: <1023@sys.uea.ac.uk>
Date: 3 Dec 89 13:38:48 GMT
References: <1989Nov30.044549.24362@ug.cs.dal.ca>
Reply-To: jrk@uea-sys.UUCP (Richard Kennaway)
Organization: University of East Anglia, Norwich
Lines: 34

In article <1989Nov30.044549.24362@ug.cs.dal.ca> johnston@ug.cs.dal.ca (Bruce Johnston) writes:
>I realize that Inside Mac explicitly states that TextEdit does not support the
>use of tabs. (at least IM I does) Anyway I would really like implement some
>sort of tab system. It wouldn't have to be very complicated.... a fixed length
>tab would be fine. 
>
>Has anyone had any experience in doing this or any ideas. I thought about 
>checking for a tab before I go into TEKey and if I find a tab then I would
>change the call into a specified number of spaces by repeatedly calling TEKey
>with a space value.

That's exactly how I did tabs in a little TextEdit-based editor I have,
originally based on one of the TransSkel demos.  The users seem to like it.

>But this would be a real, and I mean REAL, ugly hack and

Ugly?  It avoids assembler and patches - good enough for me :-).

>it wouldn't help with back tabbing. So anybody got any neat ideas?

For back tabbing, I defined option-backspace to delete spaces back to
the last tab stop (mutatis mutandis when there isnt a run of spaces back
to the last tab stop).

Remember to handle not just tab keystrokes, but every other way of
inserting tabs, e.g. pasting, reading a file, search/replace, undo.

Of course, the real answer is for someone to reimplement TextEdit to
handle tabs, large buffers, and low memory, and make it public domain.
Any takers?  (Don't ask me, I'm just a hobbyist.)

--
Richard Kennaway          SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.
Internet:  kennaway@sys.uea.ac.uk	uucp:  ...mcvax!ukc!uea-sys!jrk