Problem: By default, I like to use a rather nonstandard tab width of six (6) characters. In and of itself, this is not a problem, except that I also tend to align otherwise off-by-one-or-two sections of code with a space or three. This results in code that looks a bit weird when viewed with an editor that thinks tabs should be anything but six characters.
Now, there is a pretty good solution to this problem, which is to have your editor insert your preferred number of spaces when you press the tab key; since everyone views spaces the same way, this results in files that are guaranteed to look the same in any editor using a fixed-width font. The only problem here is that when you press the backspace key, only one space is deleted, so pressing <Tab><Backspace> results in a different file depending on whether so-called “soft tabs” are enabled.
Aha! But, as the title implies, the ever-so-handy jEdit comes to the rescue.
Go to Global Options -> Shortcuts. Select “Macros”, scroll down to “Greedy Backspace”, and set BACK_SPACE (or whatever key you want) as the primary shortcut. Now, whenever the caret is preceded by *some multiple* of six (or whatever) space characters, one tab’s-width of space characters will be deleted. Thus, pressing <tab><tab><backspace><backspace> on a blank line results in a blank line. Pressing <tab><space><backspace>, however, results in a tab’s-width of spaces, since only the last space was deleted.
Similar overrides are available for the left/right directional arrow keys.
All Hail Ollie Rutherford, author of Greedy_Backspace.bsh
– edit: Dammit, I *have* to get WP to stop stripping out tags it doesn’t recognize.
