4 spaces and tab not being perfectly aligned sounds like a feature, not a bug to me.
In what scenario would you want them to be aligned? Surely any scenario would be improper use?
100% agree with the rest of course, it's always been a shock to me how little love the essential tooling gets in Windows. You'd think with all the budgets and the fat salaries they'd simply have a competent engineer or two on every (category of) tools. But then you hear about stuff like this or the Terminal debacle and it's like they're not even trying.
I think that in when using a fixed-width font in a text-only editing program, the assumption is that a tab is "made" (visually) of a number of spaces. That number is a frequent ... debatable setting, in software development teams, but at least it's a number of spaces.
Not being able to visually line up indents made out of spaces vs tabs (in any mix) breaks a very basic usability/interaction pattern, and is really rather bad. :(
The number of spaces in tabs is not a debate, that's just personal preference in your editor. The debate is if tabs should be used at all.
That tabs are not a multiple of the character width in a fixed width font is insane of course. But if any character should have that property as a feature, it would be the tab.
You are trying to create your own debate. Nobody raised that here.
The parent is only asking why fixed-width fonts are not rendered with proper alignment (my assumption – on something that was probably already aligned before).
Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width.
The only possible way for "\t|" on consecutive lines to be misaligned is either for tab not to have a constant width, or any of the axioms above to be wrong.
I don't get how is this defensible. You don't have to be Steve Jobs to see this and ask "what is this crap?"
> Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width.
I am not defending them. If a programmer makes the mistake of having any character in a monospace font be anything other than a multiple of the monospace character width.. sure revoke their programming licence. Straight back to kindergarten, have them make a turtle draw lines on a blank canvas for a couple years.
But that's not a very interesting discussion. If any editor I ever would write would have a fancy feature to mess with the sort of idiot that would use tabs for alignment, maybe I'd make tabs be off by a couple pixels. If it was intentional I would applaud them.
In what scenario would you want them to be aligned? Surely any scenario would be improper use?
100% agree with the rest of course, it's always been a shock to me how little love the essential tooling gets in Windows. You'd think with all the budgets and the fat salaries they'd simply have a competent engineer or two on every (category of) tools. But then you hear about stuff like this or the Terminal debacle and it's like they're not even trying.