3 ms·

I have never once — in a career as a professional programmer that is coming up on 30 years — needed to insert a literal tab character in a document I’m writing.

• chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  [shrug emoji] I have indeed needed to insert literal tab characters in documents, for a variety of reasons, from editing tab-separated value documents and other data files to programming where -- as shocking as it may seem -- we indented with tab characters rather than spaces. Also, of course, if "expand tabs" is on, the tab key inserts the appropriate number of spaces. At any rate, I don't know when BBEdit may have added that preference. It's always, AFAIK, had "shift right" and "shift left" commands bound to Cmd-] and Cmd-[ respectively, which follows a pretty long, albeit informal, tradition of Macs apps using those for changing the indentation of existing text. (I get that it may seem awfully pedantic to separate "change indentation of existing text" from "change indent of text as you're typing," but if you've been using computers for 30 years, it's surprising you've never seen that before. The first time I selected text and typed tab and the indent changed, it actually wasn't what I wanted and I was pretty confused as to what the hell was going on, although of course I've gotten used to it since.)
  • jfb 5y ago
    Fair enough, and I'm not saying that BBEdit is wrong, per se, but it is close enough to useable for me (as a very long time Emacs user) that when there's something off, it strikes me as really off.