In Xcode4, can you change the characters used to display invisibles? - xcode

I much prefer Visual Studio's way of displaying invisibles... a simple dot for spaces, and an arrow for tabs. When you change the color to be a light-light-gray, they provide excellent help when viewing code alignment and such but they're barely noticeable so you can leave them turned on all the time without really getting in the way.
Xcode4 however (and maybe other versions as well) instead display some truncated-'U' shape for a space and don't appear to show anything for a tab, Worse, as I mentioned in another post, Xcode doesn't respect its own setting for invisibles color.
Still, this question is about changing the default character used. I don't care if it's a hack of a plist file or even digging around in the contents of Xcode's app bundle (knowing any updates would revert it if it was) but as they are now, they're just too unusable because of how much they obstruct whitespace and thus skimming of code. (VS really nailed that.)

The only way (I could figure out) to do it is to find the symbol that it uses (note they change along with font) open the font in a font editor and copy paste the glyph you want to the one in spot occupied by the character you want to change. There are a few free editors and some really expensive ones I was able to use ttfedit http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/TTFEdit.shtml to find and change the character XCode used for spaces on one of the more silly fonts I have to make sure it worked before I answered. Saved font to desktop, double clicked and installed it, osx complains that it is duplicate font, say resolve differences and pick your new file and say resolve to turn off the old font. Next time you open xcode you should see your new symbol for space.
Probably another way to do this, but may be the only way without getting deep into XCode source to find where it makes decision for symbol to use (note many use white diamond but helvetica for instance uses a kinda floor bracket thing, you may see the pattern but I didn't).

Related

Convert tab to spaces

Usually we replace tabs to spaces in editors while coding.
What is the exact need for that?
Is it for because the OS handles \t in the files?
I am really not very sure of this. Kindly clarify
Tabs don't have fixed width, its width depends on IDE (editor) settings. It is usually set to have width 4 spaces, but it doesn't have to be. There probably wouldn' be any problem if you use only tabs and don't use spaces, but this will never happen. You can bet, you will always want to move some text by only one extra space to the right. Then you will be mixing spaces and tabs together and that's what brings trouble. It might look correct in your IDE, but then you will want to do some change in vim editor for example, where there will be different tab size set. Indentation of the code won't be what would you expect. Also when you send some code to your co-worker, he might use different IDE with different settings and he will again see wrongly aligned code. On the other hand with spaces only you see what see the others.

When editing html in VS2013, I want to be able to type & [ampersand space] without getting &Aacute. How can I set that?

When editing an html file in VS2013, when I type an ampersand followed by a space, the editor automatically gives me &Aacute instead of just &. Is there a way to turn this off with high granularity? I don't want to disable the autotype feature entirely (at least, not yet). But this one is (in my opinion) ridiculous, since I don't ever use &Aacute (it's not a common character in English, to say the least).

Sublime Text autocomplete suggestions looks corrupt, how to fix?

Not sure what is happening to my installation of Sublime Text, when ever autocomplete drop down appears it is populated with a bunch of corrupted looking suggestions, this just started recently. I have Googled around and have not yet seen another person with the same issue. I've already tried uninstalling, throwing out User/me/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3 folder, and re-installing, but still the corrupted text shows up in my autocomplete. I am working on a Macbook Air, I also use a Macbook Pro at work with the same setup and have never seen this happen before?
As established in the comments, you have base64-encoded strings (likely an inline image) elsewhere in your file. Sublime's default autocomplete populates its choices menu with elements from your file, and uses fuzzy matching to bring up selections. Since base64 can contain all letters and numbers, chances are that any sequence you're typing may match, and that string will be brought to the top of the autocomplete dropdown.
There are a couple of ways around this. First, if the base64 content is actually scoped as a string (i.e., it's surrounded by single or double quotes), you can add the following line to your settings (Preferences -> Settings-User):
"auto_complete_selector": "source - comment - string, meta.tag - punctuation.definition.tag.begin"
This should hopefully solve your problem for the time being, with the downside that you lose any other string-encoded information that you may wish to be in autocomplete.
You can also try using an autocomplete engine like SublimeCodeIntel (works for multiple languages, including JS) or TernJS. These can have the option of turning off Sublime's internal autocomplete mechanism, and just filling in the choices with their generated content.

visual studio highlighting space / horizontal line between parentheses

I would like to show a vertical line, next to the linenumbers, in my visual studio 2010 between parentheses when my courser is between those 2 parantheses.
I alread had that option enabled, but somehow its gone.
edit: is nobody using that feature? one of the very nice things when you are debugging
Is no one using that feature??
Edit: so last push!! there must be a way to see where the space between parentheses starts and ends.
edit: here is an image
EDIT: I still haven't found what i'm looking for. VS is so powerful there must somewhere an option or a plugin. It is really useful when you can see where your { begins and ends }.
Anyone a clue?
I haven't seen the horizontal line feature since 2008. I hated it so I haven't been looking for it either.
You should however be able to see the braces being highlighted when your cursor is on them. If not, perhaps you've changed your theme or possibly some colors in your Options menu.
Here's what you should try:
Tools ->
Options(down at the bottom of the drop-down) ->
Environment ->
Fonts and Colors
Make sure the Show settings for: selector is showing Text Editor.
The one(s) you're looking for are Brace Matching (Highlight/Rectangle).
Attempt to change it to your choosing and see if the changes take place. If not, reset to the defaults and re-check it's enabled.
Also...
Another suggestion that can be handy to get a temporary look at the extents of the body you can hover your mouse just along the margin it will highlight the most nested body. You may have to do some tweaking of your colors to make it vibrant. I use a darker color and have my code block highlighting white. I know it's not what you're looking for but it might be somewhat of a band aid.

Configuring TextMate to add empty scroll-space at bottom of document view?

I've been using BBEdit for years, but I've just started using TextMate because I find it has better support for Ruby on Rails than BBEdit (please don't start a flame-war over this!).
One thing I really miss is that BBEdit can add 1/2 or 1/1 page of empty space below the document (without adding lines to the actual document). This means that I will never have to write code at the very bottom of the window/screen, but I can always scroll the page to get the current line at a comfortable hight on the screen, even if it is the last line in the document.
Now, this might seem minor, but after using TextMate for a few days, missing this feature is really starting to bug me.
On the off chance that there is a setting I missed, or that there is a plugin or something out there, I thought I'd throw the question out here. If you know of any way to replicate this behaviour in TextMate, please share!
There is now an option in TextMate 2 to scroll past the end of the document.
This might be rather a late answer but i am posting b/c this question is high in google. Looking for the same issue i found:
PageFeed
PageFeed is a TextMate plugin that allows one to scroll past the last line of a document.
Its not perfect but for most cases its all you need: https://github.com/ampt/PageFeed
I don't think I've ever witnessed a flame war involving BBEdit.
No, TextMate doesn't allow that.
You could create a macro/snippet to add a bunch of \n at the bottom of the file.
Vim, Emacs and Sublime Text all allow this and have better RoR support than BBEdit.
Lacking a scrolling margin, especially at the bottom, when searching in text, is the most frustraing thing in Notepad, Word, Excel, etc. and is enough by itself to make me hate the products on almost a daily basis. EDT, TPU, etc, were great text editors which had this feature (maybe they introduced it) and, now that I've found Emacs emulates them, I use it all the time, and text editing life is good again. I can't understand how most of the world accepts the crazy situation of using a text editor that is worse than those in vogue 20 years ago.
For those who aren't clear about the concept or benefits of a scrolling bottom margin, it is not just about adding empty space below the document, but it also lets you see the context of text found in a search. Without a scrolling margin, the cursor is almost invariably positioned at the bottom line of the screen on the item found, and then to see what comes next you have to manually scroll further down. With a scrolling margin, the cursor and found text are repositioned above the bottom of the screen by the margin amount, letting you see the found text and all the text surrounding it. With repeated searches of the same text, this is a huge timesaver.

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