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Henrik
Senior Member
30 Posts |
 Posted - Jan 13 2006 : 01:22:25 AM
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Hi, a coworker of mine (we have a 5 user license of VA) is also a fan of VA, but he misses a small feature. Would it be possible to add to VA?
Here's what he wrote to me:
I'd like to have the following feature:
To see inconsistent whitespacing I am used to have "Tab" chars displayed differently from "Space" chars. Ok, there is the "show whitespaces" feature in every IDE, but I hate to see all the dots and arrows -- you can not see anything anymore (and I doubt that anyone used that feature). It would be better to _only_ display the arrows for tabs, but _not_ the dots for spaces.
Or even that: I have my current favorite editor configured in a way that it displays tab characters in a very-bright-yellow background color. this way I can distinguish tab-indention from space-indention and can decide (depending on if I want to "destroy" the original workers layout) if a should be careful to insert tabs or spaces to indent the code. And if I just want to quickly hack away I can visually ignore the slightly different colors. (And in my own source code I have no different colors because I only use spaces anyway).
That would be a very good team-feature, because it enables different indention-styles in a project (or inter-project) -- if the users are careful. They just see immediatly when they _should_ be careful and can choose to ignore carefulness. Very useful for people who enconter different indention styles frequently and do not want to be framed as "coding style breakes" from other developers... :-)
All the Best
Henrik |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
19020 Posts |
Posted - Jan 16 2006 : 4:09:56 PM
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an interesting question. there are two practical problem from my point of view.
a) i believe that changing the background colour of text is very difficult, since VA is having to sneak past the IDE and re-draw the screen without breaking anything.
b) you already have a problem with the IDE's auto format features. as soon as you allow the IDE to indent any code for you it will insert either tabs or spaces depending on your global settings.
going down this road potentially opens the door to the whole question of code styles and formatting. i have asked about this before myself, and VA is not going to get into this. ask 3 different developers how code should be formatted and you will get 3 different answers 
i am not sure if VA should be looking at the more limited question of highlighting white space or not. the unfortunate truth is that this is probably only of interest to a very small number of our users. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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Feature Request
