Introducing Cobra

[SJS]

begin  quoting Ralph Shumaker as of Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 12:14:27AM -0800:
> SJS wrote:
> >The eye *believes* whitespace, but it's also not very good at it.  It's
> >okay at determining that yeah, verily, there *is* whitespace, but it's
> >not very good at determining how much.  For very small programs, that's
> >okay; but these languages are no longer being used solely for small 
> >programs.

...to follow my own comment, one of the neat things in many IDEs (and
some editors too) is the thin line that marks some column boundary,
typically column 80.  Having a reference other than the edge of the
window is, amazingly enough, quite useful.

> I never understood why spaces and tabs cannot be displayed with 
> something visible.

There are several (proprietary) programming editors that do just that.
Flexibly. (Some of those editors are very nearly an IDE in and of
themsevles.)

In vi(m), I use ":set list" and ":set nolist" frequently -- it lets me
look for tabs (^I) and trailing spaces in the source code.

[snip]
> Come to think of it, does anyone know how I can modify the fonts that 
> show up in gnome terminal and vim, and even the console while I'm at it, 
> and any other fonts that are used by programs like firefox and 
> thunderbird?  Come to think of it, I can't be the only one who has ever 
> wanted such a thing.  Is anyone aware of fonts already so modified?

Well, gvim will let you choose your own font.

Presumably, xrdb(1) would let you set the font-string for the X
application of your choice. I haven't tried this. It's been ages
since I've messed with fonts.

-- 
When someone's preferred language or data format a custom editor requires
Then the benefits of the language are moot, they're looking for tool buyers.
Stewart Stremler