Redmine

For those of us using vim modelines it would be great if they were parsed, allowing a per-file display configuration. Looking for tabstop=*X* in the first few lines of the file doesn't seem too hard.

Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz wrote:

For those of us using vim modelines it would be great if they were parsed, allowing a per-file display configuration. Looking for tabstop=*X* in the first few lines of the file doesn't seem too hard.

Get yer own feature request! ;-) Yeah, that's cool, but I think that'd be a completely different feature request. I'm just asking for a little drop-down combo box in the project settings page to set a tab width. You want a feature that looks for Vim stuff, which is a bit different than my request.

Thomas Lecavelier wrote:

Hey, you see? I can play with statuses too... [...]

That's not nice...

+1 for setting tab-width.
I think this feature is not implemented yet.

Dear Chris Miller. hope you to check SubmittingBugs
Dear Thomas Lecavelier. if it is not invalid request, how about to reopen?

Just an update...

I have found that by modifying the following lines of code:

source:tags/0.8.7/app/helpers/application_helper.rb#L192

def syntax_highlight(name, content)
    type = CodeRay::FileType[name]
    type ? CodeRay.scan(content, type).html(:tab_width => 4) : h(content.gsub("\t"," "*4))
end

And

source:tags/0.8.7/lib/redmine/wiki_formatting/textile/formatter.rb#L58

CodeRay.scan($2, $1.downcase).html(:escape => false, :line_numbers => :inline, :tab_width => 4)

I was able to hard-code my site to have a tab width of four characters. Mind you, this isn't a tab-stop - a lot of the time things don't quite line up, but at least they're only off by at most three characters! It's a far sight better than before!

If someone with more Ruby-fu could extract that to a kind of configurable variable we might have a worthwhile patch on our hands.

I have found an even better way of converting tabs to spaces. This respects tab stops, which is the concept that a tab character doesn't necessarily expand to 4 (or 3, or 2, or 6, or whatever) spaces, but advances the line to a predetermined tab stop. Tabstops are generally at 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, etc.

Enough preaching about the Holy Tabstop. Here's how to make it work:

This uses the GNU CoreUtils expand command. This works on files, so I just use Ruby's Tempfile to create a temporary file, then delete it when we're done. You do need to add this line of code to the beginning of the file, however:

require 'tempfile'

Now, add the instructions to your syntax highlighter to make it expand tabs to spaces:

def syntax_highlight(name, content)
    type = CodeRay::FileType[name]
    t = Tempfile.new("expandfile")
    t.syswrite(content)
    content = `expand -t 4 #{t.path}`
    t.close
    t.delete
    type ? CodeRay.scan(content, type).html : h(content)
end

Same thing applies to Wiki formatting. (don't forget to include the require statement there, either!)

This also works quite well with the Ultraviolet plugin.

Now, even more cool!

Add the following to lib/redmine/core_ext/string/conversions.rb

        # Expand tabs to spaces
        def expand(tab_width=4)
          text = self.dup
          out = ''
          text.each_line do |line|
            column = 0
            line.each_char do |c|
              if c == "\t" 
                next_tab_column = column + (tab_width - column % tab_width)
                while column < next_tab_column
                  out << " " 
                  column += 1
                end
              elsif c == "\b" 
                column += -1
              else
                column += 1
                out << c
              end
            end
          end
          out
        end

Now, instead of all that tempfile nonsense, you can simply use content.expand in app/helpers/application_helper.rb (or content.expand(4), or however many spaces you want your tabs to expand to).

I'd say you just abandon tabs :)

But maybe a per-language setting would be okay. Ruby style is 2 spaces, C is 8, Python is 4, for example. Better than the current 8-for-all setting.

Kornelius Kalnbach wrote:

I'd say you just abandon tabs :)

Over my dead body.

But maybe a per-language setting would be okay. Ruby style is 2 spaces, C is 8, Python is 4, for example. Better than the current 8-for-all setting.

I don't know what planet you live on, but I have yet to actually meet a living C programmer who uses a tab-width of 8. All the programmers I know use a tab width of 4, though I find that a tab stop of 2 for C is actually quite nice and compact while using smaller laptop screens.

Having a per-project per-language setting seems important to me. But this is a system that would require additional database tables and rot like that, so even if I do decide to take up a patch, it'll certainly be one of those things that would only ever be a candidate for a 0.x release, and never a 0.9.x release. I absolutely believe that it should be part of the Redmine system by default, as source code with badly aligned tabs can decrease readability quite dramatically.

It this is such a hot topic, I'm happy to stay out of the discussion. CodeRay provides the option, so it's Redmine's decision how to implement it.

chris k: Earth.

There is a chance that this will be solved? I'd like to have the possibility to set tab at 4 without hacking the code.

+Vote for this! I'm using tab size 2

I've changed tab width at source code view. But, at diff view mode, it still shows me the tab width of 8. How can I change the tab width to 4 at diff view.