Tabs and spaces conversion

Question

I would like to automatically convert between tabs and spaces for indentation when I commit/update code to/from our repository. I have found the AnyEdit plugin for eclipse, which can convert directories of files. Not bad for a start, but does anybody have more expierience on how to handle this? Or maybe know of an Ant script or something else?

Answer 1

Why not just use the code formatter and/or cleanup function? It has settings that take care of that stuff for you. You can even have it run automatically on save.

Edit: As Peter Perháč points out in the comments, this only answers half the question. I don't have any practical experience, but you could try the Maven Eclipse Format Plugin to format from a Maven build.

Unfortunately, that's Maven only, and I know of no light-weight command line formatter. But if you happen to use Maven, you can bind the format goal to the proper phase, and if you set Eclipse to auto-build, it would format on update.

Depending on the SCM tool (git, svn, etc), you could also create a hook that runs the build (but it might be a bit too heavy-weight for that).

Answer 2

1. Make sure you have your editor set to use spaces instead of tabs.
2. Select all text and hit CMD + I on mac or CTRL + I on windows.

Answer 3

I use the AnyEdit plugin to auto-convert tabs to spaces on the save of a file. I also configure the base text editor (from which pretty much all the others derive) to insert spaces instead of tabs. This sounds redundant, but what it does is ensure that I don't insert any tabs, and any file that I edit that already has tabs will be converted as soon as I save it.

Tabs have no place in source code. If someone else looks at the file with their tab-stops set to a different value, they lose most alignment/formatting anyway.

(Of course, if you have Makefiles that you edit directly, you'll want to make sure their tabs are retained. But in my projects, if make is used at all the Makefile is derived from a different source, such as a Makefile.PL in Perl.)

Answer 4

A bit overkill, and only something to attempt with certain repository products that can handle it, but a hook script to call indent or astyle could do the trick. It'll format everyone's code the same way for every file, depending how you write the hook script, and it'd have to be pre-commit of course.

Answer 5

You may lose alignment/formatting by using tabs instead of spaces if and only if the tabs are not at the beginning of the line. Never use tabs insides lines, always use tabs at the front of lines. This allows you to use your editor to adjust to your desired indent level without impacting your co-workers view of the file. Challenge: Find an example where tabs at the front of the line loses alignment.

Answer 6

I use Kedit for just this thing. It also natively converts text files from Macintosh, UNIX and MS-Dos. Since it's an older editor, I use one of it's scripts to handle unicode files. You might also want to look at some of the other smart editors.

Answer 7

I use Eclipse for Java EE developer 4.6.0 Neon. I use http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/anyedit-tools