Support equivalent of softtabstop in vim

[johalun]

Hi All!

Is there a way to configure indent setting for mixed tabs? That is, basic indent is 4 spaces, but whenever the indent is a multiple of 8 (so 2nd level, 4th level, etc), a tab is used instead? We have a big project that uses this style and it would be awesome if I could use Helix for it.

If not supported by Helix yet, is there something I can add in the grammar file to make this work?

Thank you!!!

[Omnikar]

If I may ask, what's the reasoning behind this style choice? It seems odd, especially considering that some might have their tab render width to be set to something other than 8.

[johalun]

Not our choice, it's a horrible legacy we have to work with..

[johalun]

Vim and Emacs can handle it. In Vim it's setl softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 noexpandtab.

[johalun]

Is the formatter used at all when editing a file or only when formatting using for example :fmt? If the formatter is involved I could maybe configure a .clang-format to handle this.

[pascalkuthe]

I was confused here at first because you didn't post the full vim config/the explanation was a bit unclear.

What you have is that the visual width of a tab char is set to 8 (tabstop=8) which is the default vim setting. Using softabwidth=4 and shifttab=4 you configure vim to insert 4 spaces when pressing the tab (or to delete 4 spaces with backspace). While helix does allow you to configure tab width and the indent of a file separately (so shifttab=4 and tabstop=8 are possible). We have no equivalent to softtabstop. I personally think its extremely niche (as evident that your legacy codebase is the very first issue about this).

Helix can run an autoformatter on save (you just need to turn it on, clangd can do the autoformatting) so that can easily cover the "turn 8 spaces into a tab" usecase. What that doens't cover is the usecase of turning the tab back into spaces.

The most ergonomic way to deal with this is likely to just work entirely with spaces and to run clangfmt in a precommit hook. I am not sure if we want to support this in core since it does seem really niche and add quite a bit of extra completiity to tab.

[johalun]

Sorry for the confusion. I know nothing about vim. My coworker gave me that snippet saying that's what does what we need.

How would I do shifttab=4 and tabstop=8 in Helix? I haven't been able to find any information on indent options other than tab-width and unit.

Yeah I understand it's a niche style by now. Re-styling the code is not an option. For now I went back to Spacemacs..

[pascalkuthe]

tabstop=8 and shifttab=4 would be equivaent to setting unit to 4 spaces and tab-width to 8

[johalun]

Ah I see. Yeah I tried that and while it displays the code correctly, editing and inserting new code doesn't get correctly indented.

[johalun]

My hopes are that we can do a minimal whitespace change and convert tabs to spaces to save our sanity, and enable me to go back to my favorite editor :)

[pascalkuthe]

Yeah I thought about it a bit more and this just seems way to nieche to be supported in core.

Another possible workaround for you could be to have git hooks that convert tabs to spaces in checked and then convert back on check in

[johalun]

Yeah I thought about it a bit more and this just seems way to nieche to be supported in core.

That is a valid argument, but another one could be: If Helix is going to be compete with Emacs, Vim, VSCode, etc, maybe it needs to support the same flexibility and configurability (when it comes to critical features like style and formatting)?

I know Helix is still young and I think many are willing to compromise on non-critical features and functionality to use it, but lack of a softtabstop like feature makes it unusable for projects that depend on that.

[julian-klode]

FWIW,, I also encountered this issue today while evaluating helix. In APT, we indent with 3 spaces and replace 8 spaces by tabs, a completely crazy indentation scheme but it is what it is...