A Exhibition Of Tech Geekers Incompetence: Emacs whitespace-mode

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:24:26 -0700, John Nagle wrote:

> fortunatus wrote:
>> On Aug 14, 1:01 pm, vippstar <vipps... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Why would you fill your website with junk?
>> 
>> The OP made it clear:
>> 
>>> Just wanted to express some frustration with whitespace-mode.
> 
>     Well, it took until Python 3.0 until Python enforced rules that
> ensured that the indentation the user sees is the same indentation the
> compiler sees.  We finally have a solution that allows both tabs and
> spaces but disallows the situations which are ambiguous.  Until Python
> 3.0 is fully deployed, there are situations when you need an insane
> level of tab/space visibility.  Blame Python, not EMACS.

You know, there are situations outside of Python where it is useful to 
see otherwise invisible characters. I was using Microsoft Word's "Show 
Invisibles" functionality years before Python even existed. Being able to 
see a visual glyph in place of whitespace (including line ending 
characters) is not just useful for editing indentation.



-- 
Steven