From: "Brett H. Williams" <brett_williams@...>
Date: 2003-10-11T03:43:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Extension Language for a Text Editor

On Oct 11, Nikolai Weibull wrote:
> You're welcome to come aboard ;-).  I'm the maintainer of the Vim indent
> script, together with Gavin Sinclair.  It is, in my opinion, better than
> the one that comes with Emacs, even though I guess Matz wrote that one
> ;-).

Thanks for maintaining the Ruby vim indent script (Gavin also).  I use it
constantly.

One advantage I do see that the vim indent script has over emacs mode is the
matching colorization of def and end, which is a nice feature.

That said, having used both emacs mode and the vim indent script, I must beg to
differ that it is better than emacs mode.  There are a couple of annoying
things about the current vim indent script for Ruby.  

These things are annoying enough that <gasp> I have a binding that will call
out to Emacs to indent code.  I don't use it that often, but I do have it.

This is my biggest annoyance:

foo = some_method(arg1, arg2, arg3, "some long argument that eats space",
"some other stuff", arg, etc)

Emacs mode will indent the "some other stuff" according to the ( on the
previous line).

If I indent it by hand, then the line following also tries to line up with it.
This seems to be common to more than just ruby's indent script, so maybe it's
difficult (perl's does the same).  However, the C indent seems to do pretty
well, even if it doesn't line up exactly how I'd like.  It's at least indented,
and the next line after the indent snaps back to where I expect:

int main() {
  folifdsij("Helkjfkdlsjfkldjskajfkld", 
      "blah");
  bar();
  return 1;
} 

This will be the last time I complain about this though, I promise :)  Maybe I
should just learn vim indents and try and figure it out myself.  I'm just
surprised this doesn't bother more people.