smarttab.kak

smarttab.kak is a plugin for Kakoune editor. It provides three different ways of handling indentation and alignment with tab key.

Installation

With plug.kak (recommended)

Add this to your kakrc:

plug "andreyorst/smarttab.kak"

Source your kakrc or restart Kakoune, and execute :plug-install. Or if you don't want to source configuration file or restart Kakoune, simply run plug-install andreyorst/smarttab.kak. It will be enabled automatically.

Without plugin manager

Clone this repo somewhere

git clone https://github.com/andreyorst/smarttab.kak.git

You can put this repo to your autoload directory, or manually source the smarttab.kak script in your configuration file.

After that you can use smarttab.kak.

Usage

This plugin adds these three commands to toggle different policy when using Tab and > keys:

• noexpandtab - use tab for everything. Tab will insert \t character, and > will use \t character when indenting. Aligning cursors with & uses \t character.
• expandtab - use space for everything. Tab will insert %opt{indentwidth} amount of spaces, and > will indent with spaces.
• smarttab - indent with tab, align with space. Tab will insert \t character if your cursor is inside indentation area, e.g. before any non-whitespace character, and insert spaces if cursor is after any non-whitespace character. Aligning cursors with & uses space.
• autoconfigtab - choose the above based upon one of the existing settings (see later section).

By default smarttab.kak affects only Tab and > keys. If you want to deindent lines that are being indented with the spaces by hitting Backspace, you can set softtabstop option. This option describes how many spaces should be treated as single tab character when deleting spaces with backspace.

In order to automatically enable different modes for different languages you can use hooks like so:

hook global WinSetOption filetype=c smarttab
hook global WinSetOption filetype=rust expandtab

To adjust smarttab.kak related options you need to use ModuleLoaded hook, because all options are defined withing the smarttab module:

hook global ModuleLoaded smarttab %{
    set-option global softtabstop 4
    # you can configure text that is being used to represent curent active mode
    set-option global smarttab_expandtab_mode_name 'exp'
    set-option global smarttab_noexpandtab_mode_name 'noexp'
    set-option global smarttab_smarttab_mode_name 'smart'
}

If you've used plug.kak for installation, it's better to configure smarttab.kak it within the plug command, because it can handle lazy loading of configurations for the plugin, and configure editor behavior:

plug "andreyorst/smarttab.kak" defer smarttab %{
    # when `backspace' is pressed, 4 spaces are deleted at once
    set-option global softtabstop 4
} config %{
    # these languages will use `expandtab' behavior
    hook global WinSetOption filetype=(rust|markdown|kak|lisp|scheme|sh|perl) expandtab
    # these languages will use `noexpandtab' behavior
    hook global WinSetOption filetype=(makefile|gas) noexpandtab
    # these languages will use `smarttab' behavior
    hook global WinSetOption filetype=(c|cpp) smarttab
}

autoconfigtab configuration

If you just want to set the behavior based upon your editorconfig settings, you can use the autoconfigtab setting:

hook global BufCreate .* %{
    editorconfig-load
    autoconfigtab
}

This config will choose expandtab or noexpandtab based upon the indent_style setting as space or tab respectively.

If you'd prefer to use smarttab instead of noexpandtab for indent_style = tab (without affecting indent_style = space), you can manually override the aligntab option to false before running autoconfigtab, as seen in the below config:

hook global BufCreate .* %{
    editorconfig-load
    set-option buffer aligntab false
    autoconfigtab
}

Currently, autoconfigtab does not cover the case where indentwidth is nonzero but aligntab is set to true, as this would mean indenting with spaces and aligning with tabs. In this particular case, tab alignment takes priority and noexpandtab is chosen.