Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!unisoft!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Text editor help
Message-ID: <5480@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 29 Sep 88 06:43:48 GMT
References: <2476@rti.UUCP>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 24

Nope, TextEdit doesn't handle tabs.  I have no idea why they would add font
and style changes in the new version and still not handle tabs.  For an ugly
workaround, you can tabify and detabify when inserting and extracting text,
which is a humongous pain in the sacral region and does not do what the user
would like, which is seeing tabs as single characters, and preserving tabs
when leading text changes.  Think about managing end of line comments in a
C or Pascal program in a tabify/detabify editor -- every time the active part
of the line changed length, you would lose end of line comments' alignment.

There MAY be another hack you could use, but I haven't gotten the nerve to
try it yet.  Use the QuickDraw text bottlenecks to special case tabs and fill
in the appropriate width for the current insertion point.  This sounds like
a nightmare, but if it worked it would give you what you want.  (Or me what I
want, anyway.)

Everyone agrees that TextEdit should handle tabs, except Apple.  Unfortunately,
theirs is the only opinion that counts.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Consultant, Eclectic Software, sun!hoptoad!tim
"Do what you wanna, do what you will;
 Just don't mess up your neighbor's thrill.
 And when you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip
 To help the next poor sucker on his one-way trip."
    - Frank Zappa, "You Are What You Is"