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new nvi option: expandtab



Hi folks.

I've been experimenting with a new option to nvi:

       expandtab, et [off]
              Prevent the use of <tab> characters in leading whitespace
              when shifting text, autoindenting, indenting with
              <control-T>, or outdenting with <control-D>.

I find this more useful than prefiltering with expand(1) and
then setting tabstop to a large value to avoid the "optimization"
to tabs that ^T, ^D, < or > perform.
I would rather not have to change tabstop like this; for a variety of
reasons I find that leaving tabstop at 8 is sensible practice.

Currently, my modification doesn't alter the behaviour of <tab>
in insert mode; it still inserts \t.  Changing this is a fair bit
trickier;  I don't use <tab> anyway, since I have shiftwidth
set to a different value to tabstop.

(I originally called it "expandtabs", then noticed that vim(1)
has an "expandtab" option that sets similar behaviour.)


thoughts?

Luke.

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