Visual Studio/D spaces

[Johnson Jones via Digitalmars-d-ide]

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).

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.


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.