Visual Studio/D spaces

[Rainer Schuetze via Digitalmars-d-ide]

On 10.08.2017 23:29, Johnson Jones wrote:
> Hi Rainer,
> 
> this is more of a visual studio question but I figured you might know 
> the answer.
> 
> I tend to get quite annoyed by spacing when editing a D program.
> 
> When I have to combine two lines I generally have delete a lot of white 
> space in between to combine them. I'd rather all white space be removed.
> 
> e.g.,
> 
> writeln(x);
> writeln(y);
> 
> and I want to turn it in to
> 
> writeln(x, y);
> 
> I do this, usually, by hitting delete at the end of the first line, in 
> which case VS will remove the \n and bring the second line to the first, 
> but with all the spacing(indentation makes it worse).
> 
> I'd like it to look like
> 
> writeln(x);writeln(y);
> 
> after the first delete(or so).

Try Ctrl+Delete.

> 
> Also, when hitting enter to split something(say the above), visual 
> studio adds spaces rather than tabs and that causes problems due to 
> mixtures. I despise spaces. Tabs are the way to go for me, but when 
> mixed, it causes problems because I always use tabs to indent... and 
> this causes alignment errors with mixed tab/spaces of other lines.
> 
> 
> I have very simple rules for how I lay out things.
> 
> 1. Any space, tab or mixed, is treated as one token for delete or 
> backspace.
> 2. All spaces are converted to tabs when more than one space separates 
> two non-spaces. (I never use __, for example, where _ is a space.). The 
> formula for space to tab conversion is floor((tabSize*numtabs + 
> numspaces)/tabSize) + I where I is a space if the floor value is 0 and 
> would put two non-spaces net to each other.
> 3. Enter will always align with previous indentation level, clamped to a 
> tab. Backspace does the same if the previous line was empty.

My basic rule is: tabs for indentation, spaces for formatting (e.g. when 
aligning expressions vertically).

> 
> These basically treat space as simple visual alignments and tries to 
> keep everything consistent. There may be a few corner cases I forgot to 
> list but the idea is pretty simple. It is to minimize key strokes 
> dealing with alignment/space and single spaces are only ever used as 
> token separators(and no more than one).
> 
> I implemented these rules before in a vsix but it's been several years 
> and it was for C# and was somewhat of a hack(had to work on the edit 
> buffer directly).
> 
> Do you know if visual D encode these rules directly? Or does the visual 
> studio settings accomplish this if set right(I've never been able to get 
> it to work right)?
> 
> Thanks.

Visual D handles (smart) indentation, and you can configure whether it 
uses spaces or tabs in the Text Editor settings. Other than that it 
usually doesn't intercept typing white space.

I doubt that your rules are available as preconfigured settings in VS. 
Maybe this could be implemented in the EditorConfig extension (which I 
use to switch preferences within different projects).