Replace with tabulation not working

[letatas]

Hello,

I'm trying to replace spaces with tabs, but unfortunately this doesn't work:

"tweaker_space_to_tab": {
                    "find" : " ",
                    "replace": "\\t"
                }

I've also tried "\t" which also failed.

Any idea?
Thanks in advance.

[facelessuser]

The reason this isn't working for you is because you must currently have indent with spaces enabled in your view. Sublime, when a tab is inserted at the beginning of a line, will convert it to spaces. If you turn off the indent with spaces settings in your view, it should work fine.

Now, the real question is if there is a way for me to always insert without triggering this behavior; I don't know yet.

[facelessuser]

I guess it might be possible for me to check the convert tabs to spaces settings, and briefly disable it while I insert and restore the setting after. I will look into that when I have time.

[letatas]

Thanks for looking into it. In fact, even the characters not located at a beginning of a line are replaced by spaces instead of tabs.

But what is strange is that when I use the built-in find and replace function of Sublime Text, if I set the replacement to be \t, it does it the way it should, by inserting tab characters and not spaces. Even with the "indent with space" opt-in.

[facelessuser]

Yeah, turns out that "indent with spaces" option converts tabs mid line too.

So as to why it standard find and replace doesn't have this issue, it is because I am going through the API. And the View.replace replace method seems to respect the "indent with spaces" option. That is unfortunate, but not impossible to work around. I just didn't realize it was an issue until now.

[letatas]

You're not to blame! But that's true that for me, your excellent tool is used to sequence "find and replace" instead of the built-in one, that includes righteously the tab character.

Anyway thanks again for looking into it. And sorry for the "inception" of this issue in your mind...

[facelessuser]

Fix is found here c06390a. It will be included in the next release.

[letatas]

Yeah that's great! Thanks alot, when do you think the next release will be?

[facelessuser]

Done

[letatas]

Thanks a lot! But Package Control is stuck with v.1.9.0, do you know why ?

[letatas]

Damn it! I'm using Sublime Text 2, and I've just understood what ST3 stands for in front of the version. Woe with me!

[facelessuser]

You should upgrade to ST3 😉. It's just too much work for me to support all the plugins I have, and then do it for 2 separate versions of ST. I don't even use ST2 anymore.

With that said, the needed changes are found right there in the commit. You can modify it yourself for ST2 if you are resistant to upgrading. I don't mind people backporting ST3 features to the ST2 branch, I am just not going to personally do it anymore.

[letatas]

I understand, unfortunately ST3 being still in beta phase, I can't afford to switch in a production environment. But as soon as it's officially released, I'll upgrade. Meanwhile, I'll try to backport your commit.

Thanks again.

[letatas]

Backporting successful! Many thanks.

[facelessuser]

If you have it all working, I would accept a pull request to make it official. I accept backport pull requests for ST2, I just won't accept new features or changes on 2 unless it is first accepted and implemented on the main branch.

[letatas]

Done

[facelessuser]

@letatas Did you pull request it on your own repo? I don't see the pull request on my repo.

[letatas]

Ooops... My bad... It's late over here... It should be ok by now.

[facelessuser]

ST2 release here: https://github.com/facelessuser/RegReplace/releases/tag/st2-1.10.0