I looked into it, and there are not many things we seem to be able to do about it ...

... except to change the default CSS for textareas.

textarea {width: 100%;tab-size: 4;}
[download]

in line 173 of common.css

There is no way for a simple pmdev like me to provide a better patch.

/* This CSS controls presentation details common to all six original t
+hemes. */

/* This CSS has been moved to a regular file on the server(s), for
   performance reasons. If it needs to be altered, chat with a god.
   If it doesn't, chat with a god anyway. Gods are people, too. */
[download]

hence I'll message a link to this post to the gods and pray... :)

Maybe there should be a perltidy button next to preview/create?

Nice idea. However, we are encouraged (and rightly so) to wrap data within <code> ... </code> tags as well and perltidy will complain loudly about code it can't parse. We also sometimes see actual code in other languages as source material. I can just see this creating more problems than it solves in the long run.

---

🦛

Kludgy ui but were there some way to click something next to a code section (edit akin to the d/l link) that would return/add the tidied content for that block. Really I'm not coming up with anything I'd call good save heading down the path of madness to a more rich-text-y WYSIWYMG (... What You May Get) editor.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

As editors (and, apparently, browsers) can represent tabs differently, the best advice is probably to use spaces instead of tabs in your code (and many editors can do this conversion for you). Running a snippet through perltidy (as previously recommended) is probably also a very good idea.

Personally, I try to use 4-spaces for most code ('perltidy -l 123 -ple' unless I am trying to match someone else's formatting, or have another limitation), but I may have used 2-spaces for some code examples, and I try to avoid the question of how many spaces is "best" (as that argument is almost as long and as bad as those of editor choice).

Just my thoughts...

Again: Not the question.

It's very easy: some ppl use tabs and the editing looks different to the final display.

Making that consistent° will spare us from seeing some ugly code.

off topic

If you want to forbid tabs altogether, you or others are free to implement² an untabify feature like in emacs and many other IDEs.

But that's another discussion and step. And it won't make misformatted code better readable. Especially as long as the input textarea looks different to the final rendering (sic).

Regarding perltiy: I'm looking forward to see the patch³ to integrate this here.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

°) should be easy

²) not that easy, but feasable

³) LOL

Untabbify for vim (add to .vimrc)

:map <F3> :%s/\t/    /g <CR>
[download]

Then press F3 to untabify ;-)

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