You can use any text editor to work on deft, but there are some common mistakes that you can avoid by appropriately configuring your text editor. This page will first outline those mistakes, and then explain how to configure your editor to avoid them.

  • We prefer to use space characters rather than tab characters in deft. This makes the indentation conisitent across all editors, and is generally nicer. Your editor should never put tabs into a file. If it does so, it is very hard for you to notice that this has happened.

  • If your editor supports automatic indentation, set it to indent by two spaces.

  • We would prefer never to end a line with spaces. The single exception is that when a blank line occurs within source code, it is reasonable (but not necessary) for it to be indented just as much as the surrounding code. Your editor should ideally show trailing whitespace so that you can avoid adding it.

The preceding rules are valuable because every change to white space that is made could conflict with real changes made by another developer to the same file. This is a pain.

  • The final problem that can occur (and can be alleviated by an editor) is that if you have a file open while doing a git pull, you can end up accidentally saving the file, overwriting the version that you just pulled. At a minimum, your editor should strongly warn you if a file is modified (e.g. by git) that you are editing.

Configuring emacs

You configure emacs by editing the .emacs file in your home directory. The most relevant lines you will want to add are:

(setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil)
(setq-default show-trailing-whitespace t)

By default, emacs will warn you if you try to edit a buffer for a file whose contents have changed on disk. You could go one step further and have emacs update the buffer automatically (if there were no unsaved changes) by adding the following to your .emacs file:

(global-auto-revert-mode)

Configuring kate

Kate is a reasonably nice text editor to use in working with deft (or other programming projects. It's pretty familiar to non-unixy folks, but is less familiar to old-timers. The following changes in kate's configuration should make kate behave reasonably well.

  • Under "General" configuration, set kate to warn about files modified by foreign processes.
  • Under "Editing" set kate to insert spaces instead of tabs.
  • Under "Editing" set tab width to 2.
  • Under "Editing" set kate to highlight trailing spaces.