improvements to UI: hard/soft tab settings

[chharvey]

This request is simply for an improvement of UI in the settings pane, specifically related to tab settings.

Tab Type

Currently, the Soft Tabs checkbox is separated far away from the other tab settings (Tab Length and Tab Type). Related settings should be grouped together; listing settings in alphabetical order does not make things easy to find (in my opinion).

Since the Soft Tabs setting is only useful when Tab Type is "auto", I suggest removing the Soft Tabs checkbox and instead provide four options for Tab Type:

1. hard (always use hard tabs)
2. soft (always use soft tabs)
3. auto hard (detect, but if detection fails, fall back to hard)
4. auto soft (detect, but if detection fails, fall back to soft)

This puts all of the tab functionality into one setting, making things clear and concise.

Tab Length

Additionally, I think the Tab Length setting should be reworded. Currently it says,

Tab Length: The number of spaces used to represent a tab.

This is technically incorrect for two reasons. First, some people use hard tabs, so it would be wrong to label this value as a “number of spaces”. But more importantly, tabs (or spaces for indentation) are positioned by tab stop, and are not always a constant length. For example, if Tab Length is set to 4ch, and the cursor is at column 3, then pressing the Tab Key will either insert 2 space characters (if using soft tabs), or insert 1 tab character that is only 2ch wide (if using hard tabs). In either case, the apparent advancement of the cursor is only by 2ch, not 4ch as the setting would indicate.

My suggestion is to rename Tab Length to Tab Stop Length, and reword the description to match.