Author: Alan Pearce, Daniel Dehennin, John Croisant, Matt Renaud
Updated:
Summary
Intelligently indent with tabs, align with spaces!
Commentary
This package provide a semantic way of using tab characters in
source code: tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.
It is derived from
with modifications by the various authors listed above.
Modification history is at .
Installation:
The easiest and preferred way to install smart-tabs-mode is to use
the package available on MELPA.
Manual installation:
Save smart-tabs-mode.el to a a directory on your load-path
(e.g., ~/.emacs.d/elisp), then add the following to your .emacs file:
(autoload 'smart-tabs-mode "smart-tabs-mode"
"Intelligently indent with tabs, align with spaces!")
(autoload 'smart-tabs-mode-enable "smart-tabs-mode")
(autoload 'smart-tabs-advice "smart-tabs-mode")
(autoload 'smart-tabs-insinuate "smart-tabs-mode")
Enabling smart-tabs-mode within language modes:
As of version 1.0 of this package, the easiest and preferred way to
enable smart-tabs-mode is with the smart-tabs-insinuate function;
for example,
(smart-tabs-insinuate 'c 'c++ 'java 'javascript 'cperl 'python
'ruby 'nxml)
will enable smart-tabs-mode with all supported language modes.
(See below for instructions on adding additional language support.)
The old method of manually enabling smart-tabs-mode is still
available, but is no longer recommended; smart-tabs-insinuate
wraps the functionality below in a convenient manner.
For reference, the basic manual method looks like this:
(add-hook 'MODE-HOOK 'smart-tabs-mode-enable)
(smart-tabs-advice INDENT-FUNC TAB-WIDTH-VAR)
Note that it might be preferable to delay calling smart-tabs-advice
until after the major mode is loaded and evaluated, so the lines
above would be better written like this:
(add-hook 'MODE-HOOK (lambda ()
(smart-tabs-mode-enable)
(smart-tabs-advice INDENT-FUNC TAB-WIDTH-VAR)))
Here are some specific examples for a few popular languages:
;; C
(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'smart-tabs-mode-enable)
(smart-tabs-advice c-indent-line c-basic-offset)
(smart-tabs-advice c-indent-region c-basic-offset)
;; JavaScript
(add-hook 'js2-mode-hook 'smart-tabs-mode-enable)
(smart-tabs-advice js2-indent-line js2-basic-offset)
;; Perl (cperl-mode)
(add-hook 'cperl-mode-hook 'smart-tabs-mode-enable)
(smart-tabs-advice cperl-indent-line cperl-indent-level)
;; Python
(add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'smart-tabs-mode-enable)
(smart-tabs-advice python-indent-line-1 python-indent)
Adding language support
Language support can be added through the use of the macro
`smart-tabs-add-language-support'. Pass in the symbol you wish
to use to identify the language, the mode hook, and a list
of cons cells containing (indent-line-function . offset-variable).
For example, if C++ mode was not provided by default it could be
added as follows:
(smart-tabs-add-language-support c++ c++-mode-hook
((c-indent-line . c-basic-offset)
(c-indent-region . c-basic-offset)))
NOTE: All language support must be added before the call to
`smart-tabs-insinuate'.