Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code

Elastic tabstops in Gedit

I have written 2 plugins for Gedit, one that provides the main elastic tabstops functionality, and another that allows users to convert files that use spaces for alignment.

Click to watch a screencast of gedit with elastic tabstops

Install the ElasticTabstops Python package: sudo easy_install ElasticTabstops

Download the plugins (and optionally the c code for the main plugin).

Extract the files to ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins

Delete the libelastictabstops.x86_32.so or libelastictabstops.x86_64.so file so the only .so file remaining is the one that matches your machine's processor architecture. Rename it to libelastictabstops.so

Optionally use the following commands to set the minimum width and padding width values:
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/gedit-2/plugins/elastictabstops/minimumwidth 32 gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/gedit-2/plugins/elastictabstops/paddingwidth 8

Activate the plugins in the preferences dialog.

up to nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/

Elastic tabstops were invented by Nick Gravgaard in the summer of 2006. All text and images on this page are copyright © 2006-2010 Nick Gravgaard and licenced under the GNU Free Documentation Licence. This page was last updated on 2010-04-02.