equivalent of indent-region?

[hw]

On Thursday, September 19, 2019 10:05:14 PM CEST René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Thursday September 19 2019 17:06:01 hw wrote:
> >> But under Tools/Indentation you can select different indentation types
> >> which may be sufficient for your needs.
> >
> >Which one should I use?  I'm assuming that "normal" means that an
> >indentation is being used which is suited to the contents of the buffer. 
> >In case for perl, it is doing the highlighting as can be expected.
> 
> Highlighting and indentation are 2 different aspects.

Do you mean that an editor upon loading a file should decide to use 
highlighting for perl and at the same time not also use indention for perl in 
the same buffer?  In such a case, I'd say that such an editor is broken unless 
the user has configured it otherwise.

> I have no idea what kind of indentation you'd want for perl,

Useful indentation would be nice to begin with.  I don't expect kate/KDevelop 
to do everything cperl-mode in Emacs do.  "Useful indentation" would start 
with the editor indenting contents of block contents between braces, and it 
needs to be able to do that for the whole buffer or selected parts of it when 
instructed to do by a command like indent-region.

> nor what "normal" really stands
> for. That's a question you should ask on the kwrite-devel ML.

They should make a better entry in the menu for it.
 
> >Why shouldn't I use KDevelop?  It seemed to me that KDevelop is like an
> >adorned version of kate in that it has added features some of which could
> >be useful.
> 
> You could indeed say that the editor component in KDevelop is an "adorned
> version of Kate", but KDevelop is much more than that, and Kate has other
> features that KDevelop doesn't have (or instead in a much more complex and
> costly implementation).
> 
> I didn't say you shouldn't be using KDevelop, just that it has lots of
> features you won't be using but that do increase the footprint.

KDevelop has features kate doesn't have and which I would have use for if it 
would be usable to begin with.  If I wasn't using a computer, there won't be 
any such footprint at all.  Compared to fvwm, KDE seems to occupy twice (if 
not more) the amount of RAM.  Shouldn't I use KDE because it has features I'll 
probably never use?

Does kate have useful features KDevelop doesn't have?

> I use
> KDevelop to maintain a collection of Tcl files and patchfiles because I
> like the project management and git GUI in KDevelop better than the
> counterparts in Kate.

Those would be some of the features I might find very useful.  I haven't tried 
them because I wanted to get the basic functionality first.

> Kate does have a text filter plugin btw.

Is there some documentation about it?  Most web pages about KDE things appear 
about 10 years old.

> And you could of course contribute a perl plugin for KDevelop, or a patch of
> the astyle plugin that adds perl formatting support.

Is there some documentation about such plugins for KDelevop?  Can it be 
programmed like Emacs can?

Sadly, with few exceptions, bug reports are being ignored, and provided 
patches, with no exceptions, also are being ignored.  So even if I were to 
make a plugin or a patch or some software, I make what I make only for myself, 
unless perhaps on explicit request maybe in case someone begs nicely.  Even 
just to make a bug report, I have to be seriously annoyed by something and 
without reasonable alternative because it's so futile.