Re: mc Digest, Vol 102, Issue 3

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, chris glur wrote:

> --------------
> > 2. The ghost tabs and ghost single space characters are not 
> > transferred........................................
> >    anywhere else when mouse-paste is done........
>
> You mean an exta comminication between the mouse-paster and the editor?
> Such complications are to be avoided.
>
> >  I understand that there is an option to turn these ghost characters on,
> > or to turn them off.
> GOOD! Show me how ?

Well, I had to go and check on this because I find it rather too 
inconvenient to turn this stuff off and on all the time. But the following 
does work:

1. You are editing a file where you see the objectionable <---------->
things which indicate tabs, and you want them to go away. So ...

2. Hit F9, Open the "Options" tab on the upper bar.

3. Go down to "General" and open it. You will see a table called "Editor 
Options."

4. Among the editor options you will see "[ ] Visible tabs" and another 
one which is "[ ] Visible trailing spaces" among others. These are of 
course "on" if you see an x inside the brackets, like this "[x]" and they
are off if there is only "[ ]" so you switch these either on or off 
according to taste and then exit with save by hitting the "OK" option.

Thus, it would seem to me that this gives you what you need. Apparently 
you do not want to have these invisible characters under any circumstances 
so just turn them off. 

Unfortunately, it does not solve *my* problem which is that it is so 
difficult to turn them on or off that it is disruptive. Thus, I continue 
to wish for an option to turn on and off, which would let the human 
editing the file to see the invisible characters but cause them to be 
invisible to the mouse.


> > 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
> > 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..
>
> No. My requiremet trumps yours.
> The most primitive requirement is UNIQUE.
> All further fancy-facilities are merely ONE of an infinite fad posibility.
> In law and common sense, drinking water may be a human-right; tea,
> coke...whisky is not.

True enough. But I bet that I am not alone in saying that the editor is in 
your sense "more primitive" than the mouse. Look at history. Which came 
first? The editor? Or the mouse? Which was a more basic need for the 
development of the modern computer? The editor? Or the mouse? Some, I 
believe, would think that your statement about "further fancy-facilities" 
applies more appropriately to the mouse, not to the editor. I have known a 
lot of people who thought that, and some of them have hardly been geeks at 
all, just ordinary users who wanted to get work done. It is good to keep 
that in perspective and not to get too dogmatic about whether modern 
feature X of a computer is more essential than modern feature Y. Sometimes 
_both_ X and Y have their appropriate uses and the best approach of all is 
to make sure that X and Y do not clash and interfere with each other 
and/or cripple some really nice and useful feature of the other. 

But all of that is by the way. In the present circumstances what I 
understand is that you want tabs and spaces to be invisible at all times 
because they get in the way of mouse-copy or mouse-paste. In the mcedit 
config options, there is indeed a way to turn them off, which would seem 
to solve that problem for you.

Cheers,

Theodore Kilgore