Add elastic tabstop feature

+1

With this feature, it would make Sublime THE perfect editor.

It's a chicken-egg problem a little bit though... If there is no professional cross platform editor which supports elastic tab stops, then how people could try it for real and have a feel of it?

I have to admit, even I can't tell if it's really a great feature or not, since I couldn't try it for real work. I can just extrapolate from the http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/ article, where I recognized my pains have a name...

I was a hardcode vim guy for 10+ years, then used TextMate for a year and couldn't find anything better than that until yesterday. Sublime know utterly *everything*:

- knows save on focus lost

- have the intelligent filename search (with instant file preview!!!)

- can open full folders

(no need to create a project for it explicitely!!!...)

- handles proportional fonts

- handles double width characters (chinese for example)

- beautiful default color scheme with black background

- distraction free "zen" mode

- CROSS PLATFORM!!!!

- no stupid dialog box config

these features make it the best editor for me.

and i tried the following editors, just to make the foundation of my comparision clear:

textmate, textwrangler, jedit, redcar, eclipse, netbeans, aptana, komodo, macvim, smultron (2), notepad++, gedit (on mac, but no wide char support... has elastic tab stop plugin though) and probably a few more, but NONE of them support all the features above at once :(

If Sublime would support elastic tab stops, all the progressive minds would recommend.

Elastic tabstops would make Sublime truly, maximally unique.

ps: the correct link to the forum thread is http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=147&p=9149

There's a working implementation of this feature at https://github.com/SublimeText/ElasticTabstops.

It's not quite perfect in a couple of ways, but these mostly have to do with limitations in the API. I use it, anyway. Feel free to give it a shot and see if it suits your needs.

I'm the inventor of elastic tabstops, and that is not a working implementation of my invention. If the API for a text widget does not allow the user to move tabstops to non uniform positions on different lines then it is impossible to do a proper implementation. The package you linked to modifies the contents of the buffer (by inserting spaces) rather than working on the view (by moving tabstops since Sublime Text lacks that feature), and so completely misses the point of my invention.

im still missing this functionality a lot...

practically nothing else is really missing from sublime.

(maybe multi column view on a per tab basis, but the bufferscroll plugin is good enough)

Sublime Text needn't add this feature, but the API should make it possible for a package to provide it.   Right now the API is missing the necessary hooks. See http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/news/elastic-tabstops-lite/  by Nick, the inventor of elastic tabstops ( and https://github.com/SublimeText/ElasticTabstops/issues/4 )

+1 for the feature.

http://sublimetext.userecho.com/topic/179072-/ is a little like this. Would be cool.