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Can people who put in a ton of whitespace in the middle of lines so that (on monospace) bindings or table values match up vertically please lay that off? Thank you.
I don’t want my Lisp to be ASCII art. This isn’t Befunge.
(This isn’t refering to whitespace at the beginning of lines, a.k.a. indentation. That’s fine.)
Let’s say we have this code:
(defcustom straight-hosts '((github "github.com" ".git") (gitlab "gitlab.com" ".git") (bitbucket "bitbucket.com" ".git")))
First of all, it looks dumb on proportional fonts (where a space isn’t the width of a character) and on screenreaders (where you only can read one line at a time).
Then, let’s say we wanna change this by adding a longer line, like, say, a frobnicate forge.
(defcustom straight-hosts '((github "github.com" ".git") (gitlab "gitlab.com" ".git") (bitbucket "bitbucket.com" ".git") (frobnicate "frobnicate.example" ".git")))
Now the columns are wack, which, again, you’d need a visual display with monospace characters to see.
This is fiddly AF to try to align, and if you do manage to do it:
(defcustom straight-hosts '((github "github.com" ".git") (gitlab "gitlab.com" ".git") (bitbucket "bitbucket.com" ".git") (frobnicate "frobnicate.example" ".git")))
your diff now has to touch every single line in the sexp.
I really like using Paredit to write code because of how it lets me think of the code in terms of nodes and edges as opposed to how it’s visually represented. I navigate the code like a tree, going in and out of sexps.
But let’s say we do manage to write and commit this code. Then, when we wanna search for a line of code that has, say, frobnicate followed by “frobnicate”, we can’t grep for it unless we use a variable whitespace regex.
Instead, I want the code to look like this:
(defcustom straight-hosts '((github "github.com" ".git") (gitlab "gitlab.com" ".git") (bitbucket "bitbucket.com" ".git") (frobnicate "frobnicate.example" ".git")))
Each inner list is represented as meaningfully its own thing.