From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people Newsgroups: fa.editor-p Title: Editor Preferences Article-I.D.: ucb.1203 Posted: Fri May 28 01:09:19 1982 Received: Sat May 29 02:58:07 1982 >From COMSAT.SoftArts@MIT-MULTICS Fri May 28 00:20:47 1982 Local: Editor-People at SU-SCORE Original-date: 26 MAY 1982 22:13:48 Remailed-date: 28 May 1982 0000-PDT Remailed-from: J.Q. JohnsonRemailed-to: Editor People: ; While we are declaring preferences: 1. Please note that there are a number of EMACS implementations -- each with their own restrictions. For example, mine allows multiple marks (a limit of 10 per buffer, but that is completely arbitrary as they are dynamically allocated anyway). 2. Mine converts tabs to spaces normally. This is motivated by the fact that tabs are foreign to Prime systems as they have space compression in normal text files. A main motivation for using actual tab characters is to make editing tabular data simple, but it is not a perfect method as the problem of jumping a tab distance when adding a single character illustrates. The fact that the tab spacing is not standard is a source of much confusion -- especially to recipients of letters sent by systems whose users communities apparently think tabs are every eight spaces. But tabs are not necessarily for columnar data. Rubber spaces represent an alternative. In rubber mode, any insertion will move characters until a multiple space is encountered. The insertion gets absorbed until only a single space is left. Of course this is not the only such implementation. It does have the advantage over having to predeclare columns and having all editor functions being column-dependent. (Credit to Jerry Roberts, formerly of ECD Corp for this rubber space implementation).