From: "John M. Aldrich" <fighteer AT cs DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: DJGPP vs Borland C++
Date: Sat, 08 Feb 1997 14:37:34 -0800
Organization: Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt
Lines: 43
Message-ID: <32FD002E.459A@cs.com>
References: <199701291250 DOT HAA05157 AT freenet2 DOT freenet DOT ufl DOT edu>   <19970207 DOT 210323 DOT 8119 DOT 0 DOT chambersb AT juno DOT com> <32fc184b DOT 71372045 AT news DOT ox DOT ac DOT uk>
Reply-To: fighteer AT cs DOT com
NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp104.cs.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

George Foot wrote:
> 
> >It's not QUITE that bad... Somebody on the group (I don't remember who,
> >but thanx for the trick!) posted a trick by using Ctrl-P, then TAB and
> >the tab won't be inserted as spaces but an actual tab - this works well
> >for me.  Besides, it doesn't expand the tab until you actually edit the
> >spaces where the tab resides.  In general, though, it IS a nuisance :)
> 
> In my experience, loading a makefile into Edit will destroy it. When I
> did this, all the tabs were replaced with spaces on loading, so that
> as soon as I saved it make wouldn't recognise it. I immediately looked
> for an alterntative editor (having decided this 'feature' was
> impossible to suppress).
> 
> I have a feeling that this behaviour had changed, though, from Dos
> 6.22 to Windows 95...

I believe that I was the first or second person to suggest the trick of
using Ctrl-P, Tab to override Edit's automatic tab expansion.  I use
Edit from MS-DOS 6.20, so I have no way of knowing if the 7.0 Edit
behaves differently.

The complete trick is this:

- Create a file, and type Ctrl-P, Tab in place of a real tab.  You will
see a small circle in your document.
- Save the file and load it back into Edit.  The tabs will appear to be
expanded to spaces, but now Edit will actually save them as tabs!
- If you want to avoid this problem in the future, create a blank file
containing only one line prefaced by a tab, and load it into Edit
whenever you start a session.  Then just proceed to create your document
normally.

However, all my serious editing these days is done using Emacs, which
expands tabs quite nicely, thank you very much.  :)

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
| John M. Aldrich, aka Fighteer I  |        fighteer AT cs DOT com         |
| "Starting flamewars since 1993"  |   http://www.cs.com/fighteer   |
|  *** NOTICE ***  This .signature is generated randomly.           |
|                  If you don't like it, sue my computer.           |
---------------------------------------------------------------------