Highlighted code get wrong indentation but none highlighted code is indented right.

[H4ckint0sh]

Summary

We have a 4 spaces indentation setup in our project. As seen in picture below when code in not highlighted its being rendered wright but when its highlighted it is being rendered with 2 spaces only.

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

I expected this to happen:

Instead, this happened:

Helix log

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

please provide a copy of `~/.cache/helix/helix.log` here if possible, you may need to redact some of the lines

Platform

macOS

Terminal Emulator

Kitty 26.5

Helix Version

22.12 (96ff64ab)

[CptPotato]

Summary

Self explanatory.

Please provide more information. The title is not self explanatory at all.

[pascalkuthe]

This is not an actual bug but intentional. Your code is probably indented with tabs rather than spaces. Helix allows configuring the amounts of spaces used to render a tab per language. Without highlight usually means that no language config was found for a file which means that tabwidth default to 4 but for json the tab-width is set to 2 on purpose.

If you are unahppy with this default you can change it by adding the following to your languages.toml:

[[language]]
name = "json"
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" } # by default helix inserts two spaces when pressing tab in json this changes the setting to insert a tab instead and render a tab with a width of 4 instead of 2. 

[H4ckint0sh]

screen-recording-2023-01-31-at-104236-pm_Nylzb3DO.mp4

[CptPotato]

I think this clarifies it, thanks.

It looks like the preview uses the default indent and only switches to the language specific one when the document was highlighted after the timeout.

[H4ckint0sh]

@pascalkuthe Problem is that I already have that in my language.toml and its happening regardless of that.

[H4ckint0sh]

@pascalkuthe I have not tested your file. The "languages.toml" is located i "~/.config/helix/languages.toml" and some of it as per indentation with prettier seems to be picked up.
In the video its located in dotfiles which is then being linked to the actual location mentioned above.

Does this seem wright to you?

[[language]]
name = "html"
formatter = { command = 'prettier', args = ["--parser", "html"] }
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" }

[[language]]
name = "json"
formatter = { command = 'prettier', args = ["--parser", "json"] }
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" }

[[language]]
name = "css"
formatter = { command = 'prettier', args = ["--parser", "css"] }
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" }

[[language]]
name = "javascript"
formatter = { command = 'prettier', args = ["--parser", "typescript"] }
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" }
auto-format = true

[[language]]
name = "typescript"
formatter = { command = 'prettier', args = ["--parser", "typescript"] }
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" }
auto-format = true

[[language]]
name = "tsx"
formatter = { command = 'prettier', args = ["--stdin-filename", "file.tsx"] }
indent = { tab-width = 4, unit = "\t" }
auto-format = true

[pascalkuthe]

That path seems alright. Not sure if the symlink has anything to do with it but I doubt it. An easy test to see if the config gets picked up would be to just messup the file in some obvious way (like deleting a brace or a quote) and see if helix reports an error when starting.

The config option works just fine for me both for the 22.12 tag and current master

[H4ckint0sh]

@pascalkuthe I messed it up and helix does complain upon restart, so it definitely being picked up. I am also on current master.

[pascalkuthe]

That's odd. If you could share an example file that would certainly help although I doubt that the specific file influences the indentation. You could try making a new directory and just creating the test file I posted above to rule out any interactions with your project.

However I am bit confused you reported 96ff64ab as your current helix version. That is not current master (not even in the history at all, it looks quite close to the 22.12 tag tough which is 96ff64a so I assumed you were using that)

[H4ckint0sh]

@pascalkuthe I am actually on 4dcf1fe and am compiling the latest master right now.

If i make a new map and some test json and js files then it seems to be working properly. Its odd though, what can break it in the project?

EDIT: After a new compilation have things jumped to be working it seems. Very odd! Something must have went wrong when i compiled last time.

Thank you anyways.

[the-mikedavis]

I think I have seen this as well: the preview pane in the file picker doesn't take the indentation for the language into account - it treats it as plain text. This can cause some jumpiness in the picker when the preview becomes highlighted on the idle-timeout if you are using long tabs.

For example I see this in the erlang/otp codebase which tends to use tabs as 8 columns. It also mixes tabs with spaces so you can see the jumpiness that happens here:

[H4ckint0sh]

My problem is not only in the previewer, but also in the editor itself.

[pascalkuthe]

Yeah you are right there is some jumpiness with regard to tab width in the picker. We should probably try to load the right tab width right away to avoid that (not sure how to achieve that right now tough). Altough the problem doesn't seem to be about that jumpiness but rather that the tab width of 4 is not showing up as configured