Atom editor has sunsetted on Dec 15, 2022, so it's no more possible to publish packages using Atom Package Manager CLI. You can still download the source here and manually install it.

Atom soft tabs length –

Atom package to support soft tabs length.

Install

The package is published on the APM (Atom Package Manager) registry, so you can install it through the command line interpreter using:

apm install atom-soft-tabs-length

Context

Atom soft tabs aren't configurable the way hard tabs are, that's why this package comes to the rescue: it provide an easy way to display consistent soft tabs length between different editors configurations.

Pretend that your are working on a project with soft tabs of 2 spaces. A new developer join your team, but he usually works with soft tabs of 4 spaces... that's a problem, because you don't want your source code to contain both 2 spaces and 4 spaces.

How it works

The package is built upon the great EditorConfig mechanism: it look for an .editorconfig file from the project's directory to the file system root directory and detect indentation style, based on the indent_style and indent_size properties, whether to apply soft tabs length. If no configuration file is found, no soft tabs length will be applied, and the editor will display the soft tabs normally.

Soft tabs length

To properly display the soft tabs based on your coding styles, the package simulates the presence of invisible spaces, or virtual spaces, to represent your soft tabs. To make it work, it requires the indent guide to be enabled in order to tweak the indentation width/size on the Atom interface. By default the Atom styles are override and the indent guide is hide, but you can easily choose whether to display or not the indent guide in the package settings.

For now, the package officially only support 2 spaces and 4 spaces soft tabs length

Notification

When applying soft tabs length to the current editor, the package displays scoped notifications depending on the user setting:

• Project displays a single notification as soon as you open any files in the current project
• File displays a single notification for each files in the current project
• None disables scoped notifications

Ignore pattern

You can exclude some paths with a Regex pattern to tell the package to not apply the soft tabs length setting on specific files, folders, extensions, etc.

• (app)|(index).js$ ignores app.js and index.js files
• \\git-repo\\ ignores git-repo folder
• .css$ ignores everything that ends with .css extensions

Remember that the regular expression is applied to the full path of the file

Contribute

If you want to report a bug or if you just want to request for a new feature/improvement, please feel free to fill an issue. Thanks for taking time to contribute to this package.

License

The project is developed under the MIT license:

• Permissions: This software and derivatives may be used for commercial purposes, you may distribute this software, this software may be modified and you may use and modify the software without distributing it.
• Conditions: Include a copy of the license and copyright notice with the code.
• Limitations: Software is provided without warranty and the software author/license owner cannot be held liable for damages.

Read the full license for more information about your rights.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me!
xavier.foucrier [at] gmail.com