Re: mc Digest, Vol 102, Issue 3

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2012, chris glur wrote:

> Sure, there are applications for the ghost-tabs.
> But paste-ability must take precedence over your special example,
> because it's a more basic operation.

Chris,

In a more ideal world we would be able to have both of

1. The ghost tabs and ghost single spaces show up in the editor

2. The ghost tabs and ghost single space characters are not transferred 
anywhere else when mouse-paste is done.

In my understanding, there is already a third choice which I would say is 
an imperfect solution. Namely, I understand that there is an option to 
turn these ghost characters on, or to turn them off. But this is a 
separate operation. Namely, if one were going to use it to paste something 
from a file where the ghost characters are turned on then one has to do a 
reconfiguration (something with F9 and doing something with the config for 
mcedit) and then make the pasting operation, and then turn right around 
and turn the ghost characters back on. But this is obviously an 
inconvenience and it would be much nicer if we had a config option which 
lets us do both (1) and (2) above, without confronting the need to 
re-configure mcedit twice in order to get the copying job done.

As to your statement "But paste-ability must take precedence over your 
special example, because it's a more basic operation." I am in fact not 
sure that I agree at all. Which do you spend more of your time doing? 
Editing files, or copying pieces of what you are editing to some other 
place? Me, I spend more time with editing the files. And if what I am 
editing is code, which is often the case, then I really do not want the 
hidden characters to be turned off and no way to turn them on. That would 
render relatively useless an editor which I have come to rely on for much 
of that work, which would make me unhappy.

But I really do suspect that it ought to be possible, somehow, to combine 
my two desires, above. After all, the hidden characters do indeed show up 
as "ghosts" already in the file opened in mcedit. Why can not an option be 
implemented which will pick up everything else with a mouse-copy but will 
just not pick up the ghost-characters? I myself am not sufficiently 
familiar with the internals of the MC code to look into this, sorry to 
say. But it sure would be a nice feature if we had it.

Theodore Kilgore