How do I insert a literal tab character? - xcode

I am editing a Makefile in XCode. How do I actually insert a tab character, ASCII value 9? If I press TAB, it inserts 4 spaces, and make complains because decades ago the creator of make had a handful of users and didn't want to change the program to not require literal tabs because it would break backwards compatibility or something.
Normally when editing a Makefile I just copy and paste an existing TAB character, but with a new clean one, I cannot do this.

In Xcode 6.4, at least, you can enter a literal tab with Option-Tab. This seems to work regardless of the indentation settings.

You could just change your editing preference is Xcode to use tabs while editing a makefile
Easier than messing about moving to other editors and pasting literals.

close the file in Xcode
open the file in TextEdit
be sure to check the "Ignore rich text commands" at the bottom of the open dialog
position the cursor at the beginning of a line and push TAB
close TextEdit
open the file in Xcode
select "Show Invisibles" from the "Editor" menu
note that ironically, the TABs are not displayed
however, spaces are displayed, which allows you to tell which lines start with tabs
copy the tab character as needed
If you ever meet that guy who that who thought that starting a line with a TAB was a good idea, slap him upside the back of the head, and slap him hard!!!

I've taken to opening a TextEdit, placing a TAB there, then copying + pasting it into XCode.

Related

Remove pilcrow from SQL Worksheet [duplicate]

I don't know what the hotkey I accidentally clicked, but this Ǧ looking sign appeared on every line of code, and there are grey dots instead of spaces in the code.
How can I get rid of those characters?
Assuming this is SQL Developer, go to Tools->Preferences (or on Mac, find that under the SQL Developer menu). Expand the Code Editor section and click on Display. Untick "Show whitespace characters" (second checkbox in the list).
You can check for defined shortcuts under Preferences, in the Shortcut Keys section. On Mac there isn't one for this, but Windows has it as Control+Shift+W, which will also toggle them off if you don't want to go through the preference pane.

How can I make the tabs work normally on Xcode 4?

Xcode finally added tabs but the problem is that they behave very strange. For example they will keep a tab open only if it was opened to a new tab.
If you open a file just by clicking in the project tree, Xcode will close your tab as soon as you are clicking on another file in the tree.
Is is possible to make them behave like real tabs and prevent Xcode from reusing them? How?
I use a method similar to franks:
In Preferences > Navigation (or Preferences > General in versions of Xcode prior to 5) you can set Optional Navigation to Uses Separate Tab
Now opt-clicking a file in the file navigator will open it in a new tab
Better yet, opt-clicking links in the code opens the destination file in a new tab
The big feature missing is swapping to an already open tab containing the file if there is one (or staying in the current one).
UPDATE for 2020:
Finally, almost 10 years later, Xcode 12.x now appears to mostly resolve the issue described here. There is a new Navigation Style option in the Navigation settings panel that controls this behavior.
The behavior has some new quirks/design-choices that seem to make sense, but I'm still getting used to the new experience. For example, a tab will get re-used unless the file in that tab has been edited recently; such a tab is indicated with an italics title.
PREVIOUS ANSWER
I don't think you can currently get the behavior you desire (or I desire). While the tabs work like Safari, they don't work like tabs in other popular IDEs (Visual Studio or Eclipse). And for me this kind of sucks.
In general, I expect IDE tabs to keep more than 1 file open. So if I click a file in the project tree, I expect that it will switch to the tab I have opened with that file - if I have already opened it. Instead, XCode 4 changes the current tab to the file I clicked - making 2 tabs with the same file. Having 2 tabs with the same file is fairly useless.
This forces the user to scan the tab bar first to see if the file is currently opened; if it's not opened then you can look to the project tree. But if you click in the project tree first (which is what I tend to do) then you get punished because you will have just killed a tab.
This isn't really an answer insofar as it contains a solution; I mostly just want to join in the griping. But upvoting will make you feel better and prove Apple wrong. :)
The problem with Xcode 4's implementation of tabs is that Apple has implemented them as workspace tabs. In other words, creating a new tab essentially creates a new workspace, each with its own sub-panes with their configurations, etc. It's essentially a whole environment in each tab. There are a number of problems with this choice.
This differs from most IDE/text editors' implementation of file tabs wherein a tab (generally) represents a single file, and each file has its own tab.
The problem with workspace tabs is there are only so many potential different workspaces we could benefit from, severely limiting the actual use of tabs in this way. Beyond this, the additional workspaces just become a liability, introducing more things the user of the application needs to concern him/herself with: for example, what the navigator view is, what editor mode is active (standard, assistant, version), whether the debug console is open, etc. etc. Suddenly switching to a new tab means you now have to worry about getting the environment back in the form you need it, because there's a good chance the other tab wasn't left in the state you expect to find it in. This actually discourages the use of tabs because it introduces more work in the workflow.
File tabs don't have this problem (not counting special cases like split view panes) because all that's changing is the file you're looking at, not your whole environment. Moreover, if implemented properly, file tabs work great as an immediate history, allowing one to quickly switch back to a file that was worked in recently, with little effort. The only way to do this in Xcode is to explicitly set up a new tab environment for each file you want to work with, but you have to be careful not to change the file in that tab or your file all of a sudden becomes lost: again, more work for the user.
Workspace tabs are also significantly heavier-weight than file tabs, because there is much more to remember and switching workspaces involves much more than switching files.
The truth is (and I think most will agree with me on this), to a developer, file tabs are much more useful than workspace tabs, and as it stands Xcode still lacks a proper implementation of this feature that many would consider basic required functionality in an IDE/editor.
Xcode->Preferences->General->Double Click Navigation and from the list, choose Uses Separate Tab.
Well, not a real answer but my personal workaround. The real problem for me is, that a file opened in a tab goes away so easily in xcode 4. Finding a file again can be time-consuming, so I like them to be in a tab and stay there.
I solved this (somehow) for me by exactly identifying the actions I do which cause the tab to switch to another file and replace them by their equivalent actions which open a new tab instead.
Instead of single-clicking a file in the navigator, I always double-click which I have set to open a new tab
Most time I do not use the navigator, as it has a different state of opened and closed folders in each tab. Not useful for me. So I switched to using Option ⌥ Command ⌘ O. When opening a file from this list I keep ShiftOption ⌥ pressed. In the small window appearing I choose 'new tab'.
When clicking on links in code I press ShiftOption ⌥ Command ⌘, too, and open in new tab.
I keep two fixed tabs around for editing target-related settings and to view build results. I completely disabled all automatic tab switching in the prefs, because I noticed this distracted me to much.
I would really love to get something like the xcode 3 favorites bar in xcode 4, this was so simple to use..
I imagine my answer won't bubble up for a while, but if you want this to work like visual studio or intellij (or at least closer)
Preferences->General->Double Click Navigation->Uses a separate tab
Double Clicking a file now will stop opening it in a new window and open it in a new tab.
Single is still dumb and takes over your tab. But if you get used to double clicking (which I was already) this will save you some headaches. I suppose.
I absolutely hate how tabs work in Xcode. However, the only workaround i found that works decent is using the OSX tabs shortcuts:
CTRL + CMD + ->
CTRL + CMD + <-
I found my way in Preferences-Behaviors!
I hated Xcode 4 first for the tab issues discussed here, mainly because the debug information kept opening new files in tabs and changing the navigator
in Behaviors you can define a Debug tab and make the Run and Build jump there in various ways. in the Debug tab I give more space to navigators left and bottom
for similar reasons I have a Find tab, too
the other tabs are for files I am writing in. I start them with the .h which is usually small enough so I need only one view, and then with single clicks in the navegator I open 2-3 versions of the .cpp file so I can set them to the locations where the recent hot spots in the file are. then I close the navigators in those tabs
this does not invalidate the care and tricks given in the other answers here, but makes them far less hard
happy coding!
I found out that when pressing option a.k.a. alt when opening files in the navigator, you will jump to the tab already open with the file and a new tab will open in case it was not yet open.
This technique also works when opening files via cmdshift-O and opening the suggestion with option-enter in stead of simply enter...
Now, if there would be some way to make this the default, i.e. the need to keep pressing option all the time would be removed, that would be a big step forward.
Also I use Behaviors to keep my tabs from being recycled after test or build failures.
(Like other people, I totally mislike Xcode's tab behavior. Apple should take a look at IntelliJ...)
xcode tab bar is so suck, I think Apple should enhance the feature of the tab navigation to avoid followed 3 points.
1. double click a file will let xcode open another tab if it has already been there.
2. for more tabs, the tab will become small and thus I don't know which file in which tab, I want the tab show full name
3. for even more tabs, new tabs will be hidden, instead of two lines of tabs. I want to it show two lines of tab bars.
If you have the tab bar enabled (View/Show Tab Bar) and you double click a file, it appears in it's own window, with a single tab (Be sure the Tab Bar is enabled in both the new and old (main) windows).
Now all you have to do is drag that new window from its tab and drop it into the tab bar of your main window.
It will stay docked as a separate tab, showing that file.
To change the file open in that new tab, go Project / Reveal in Project Navigator, which opens the project navigator at the left hand side.
Tabs in Xcode 4 work like tabs elsewhere on Mac OS X, for example in Safari and Terminal.

Hide linefeed and tab characters in xcode editor

As can be seen in the screenshot the editor in xcode has started to show linefeeds and tab characters, normally invisible characters. I can't for the life of me find a way to hide them again and i have no idea why they started to show. Any ideas?
Solved it, it was the bracket matching xcode plugin that caused it. Removing that restored order in the universe and xcode.

TextMate - scroll tabs

TextMate has one irritating 'feature' that shows up when editing lot of files (within a given project). in case there is no place at tab bar for new tabs, a ">>" is shown. it simply shows a popup with rest of files. that's ok, but why when one selects a file its tab is not visible? isn't it kind of iconsistency? what is more irritating here, tabs are not shown in this case even when navigating through "Next File Tab" or "Prev File Tab".
is there any way of enabling "scrollable" tabs bar or it's just "feature, not a bug" ?
This is just a byproduct of TextMate's tab-handling code (which is believe is custom-written for TextMate). I wouldn't call it a "feature" nor a "feature, not a bug", because I think it is a bug, just one that hasn't been fixed yet (development TextMate 1.x has been rather stagnant for the past couple of years). But I don't think there are any plugins that fix the bug and enabled a scrolling tab pane.

Visual Studio 2008, How can I set it to remove tabs when I backspace rather than spaces?

In Visual Studio 2008, it seems that when I tab on a line it inserts either 4 spaces or a tab, however - when I backspace it removes a tab as if it were 4 spaces, one space at a time..
I checked the text-editor settings in Tools.. tried both use spaces and use tabs, neither seem to work.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
Pete
Maybe I'm just crazy, but why don't you just press Shift + Tab instead of backspace if you want to get rid of the tabs?
Aha!! Hi Robert, that's what I did try.. However, I needed to change this setting in the 'All Languages' section so it applied to every type of page.
"Keep tabs"
Thanks
Pete
Well it's probably not writing tabs its converting tabs to spaces when you press tab. There is a setting in the options that tells VS how many spaces to insert when pressing tab, Maybe you can set it to actually insert a tab instead and backspace would then remove the tab. I've heard it's quite common to use spaces not tabs that's why its built into VS i guess.

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