Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

programmers.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#11

Post by jtreminio »

asolove wrote: post #3
wccrawford wrote: post #2

So far the only idea is to indent everything and use a graph to shot the nesting level? If we got rid of indentation, I'd like to think it was replaced by something that took less space, not more.

The context in the original question makes clear: the OP is not looking to save space. He wants to take out the structural (tabbed) spacing inherent from the nesting of XML in order to make it visually clear where documents have manually-inserted whitespace. This is actually a really interesting question, although I'm not sure the answers there are very helpful. I would prefer seeing the code actually indented, and t…

PHPStorm does something very similar to this, and it jars me everytime I try to use Netbeans and this is missing.

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#12

Post by CrabDude »

This would be great for something like node.js which is heavily nested. AFAIK it'd have to be highly configurable in order to dynamically determine nesting depth: closure, block, object literals, array declaration, etc...

Of course it'd also have to take up less space than the indentations themselves to be beneficial (assume 2 spaces). Still, I feel like there's some real potential here that could be used in something like cloud9ide.com since the majority of developers there will probably be node.js devs.

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#13

Post by Jach »

mjschultz wrote: post #6
asolove wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context in the original question makes clear: the OP is not looking to save space. He wants to take out the structural (tabbed) spacing inherent from the nesting of XML in order to make it visually clear where documents have manually-inserted whitespace. This is actually a really interesting question, although I'm not sure the answers there are very helpful. I would prefer seeing the code actually indented, and t…

It's been a while since I used an IDE (instead of vim), but don't most of them support code-folding that provides a light gray bracket for a block of code (usually with a collapsible indicator at the top)? Or is the effect you want slightly different?

Note vim can do folds too. (Not a commonly known feature, I only learned about it recently myself.) But the effect he wants is the literal bars showing indentation levels which I think some IDEs have... vim could fake it by highlighting the bg cells.

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#14

Post by Retric »

idonthack wrote: post #8
sil3ntmac wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get a 403 forbidden (check your permissions maybe?)

outside referrers are blocked, copy and paste the url

When there is no redirect so you can click a link, and then just hit CR on the blocked page's URL.

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#15

Post by adriand »

sil3ntmac wrote: post #7
adriand wrote: post #4

I believe Xcode 4 does something similar to the heatmaps shown here, although it does everything vertically, in shades of gray. You can sort of see it in this screenshot - look in the left-hand margin of the code editing window. http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/xcode4.jpg

I get a 403 forbidden (check your permissions maybe?)

Whoops! I just did a Google image search and found that image, it wasn't mine. I didn't realize it wouldn't link properly.

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

sil3ntmac wrote: post #7
adriand wrote: post #4

I believe Xcode 4 does something similar to the heatmaps shown here, although it does everything vertically, in shades of gray. You can sort of see it in this screenshot - look in the left-hand margin of the code editing window. http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/xcode4.jpg

I get a 403 forbidden (check your permissions maybe?)

[deleted]

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#17

Post by ars »

asolove wrote: post #3
wccrawford wrote: post #2

So far the only idea is to indent everything and use a graph to shot the nesting level? If we got rid of indentation, I'd like to think it was replaced by something that took less space, not more.

The context in the original question makes clear: the OP is not looking to save space. He wants to take out the structural (tabbed) spacing inherent from the nesting of XML in order to make it visually clear where documents have manually-inserted whitespace. This is actually a really interesting question, although I'm not sure the answers there are very helpful. I would prefer seeing the code actually indented, and t…

He wants automatic detection of nesting?

Good luck with that, considering I find it hard to manually decide how to indent mixed PHP, HTML and Javascript code. I can't imagine an automatic tool having any success.

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#18

Post by mvzink »

ars wrote: post #17
asolove wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context in the original question makes clear: the OP is not looking to save space. He wants to take out the structural (tabbed) spacing inherent from the nesting of XML in order to make it visually clear where documents have manually-inserted whitespace. This is actually a really interesting question, although I'm not sure the answers there are very helpful. I would prefer seeing the code actually indented, and t…

He wants automatic detection of nesting? Good luck with that, considering I find it hard to manually decide how to indent mixed PHP, HTML and Javascript code. I can't imagine an automatic tool having any success.

That's the idea man, somebody's gotta imagine it.

Re: How can a code editor hint at code nesting level without indentation?

#19

Post by greyfade »

ars wrote: post #17
asolove wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The context in the original question makes clear: the OP is not looking to save space. He wants to take out the structural (tabbed) spacing inherent from the nesting of XML in order to make it visually clear where documents have manually-inserted whitespace. This is actually a really interesting question, although I'm not sure the answers there are very helpful. I would prefer seeing the code actually indented, and t…

He wants automatic detection of nesting? Good luck with that, considering I find it hard to manually decide how to indent mixed PHP, HTML and Javascript code. I can't imagine an automatic tool having any success.

That's more or less what I told him on his other question. He originally wanted to make it more general-purpose, so that this same editor interface would be used for programming languages in general. I did my best to talk him out of that madness and he has since narrowed his scope to XML.
Post reply on HN