Tab padding character?

[m-kru]

Is it possible to set tab padding character? https://docs.helix-editor.com/configuration.html#editorwhitespace-section does not mention it.
By the way what is nbsp? Maybe it would be nice to add some comment in the line to explain it.

[the-mikedavis]

Only the space, newline, tab, and nbsp can be rendered currently. Which is the tab padding character? U+0080?

NBSP is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space. It's used most often when writing HTML.

[m-kru]

I guess there is no standard tab padding character. People use different characters for this purpose.

[the-mikedavis]

I don't understand - is the tab padding character a character in a file or something displayed when a file has a tab in it?

You can customize the latter with the editor.whitespace.characters.tab configuration you linked. For example I have mine bound to rightwards triangle (▸)

[m-kru]

In Kakoune I use centered dots. Single character length is always 1, however the tab is usually configured to be longer, hence some character to pad the tab character.

[n0s4]

Do you mean adding virtual whitespace to change tab length? Virtual whitespace is a WIP but you can configure the tab length.

[m-kru]

No. The tab character is a single character. However, the tab is usually set to be longer than single character. In @the-mikedavis screenshot you can see there is a little arrow and then nothing. In my screenshot there is a little arrow and 3 dots. It is all about how the tab is displayed.

[the-mikedavis]

Currently this isn't possible: the tab setting in editor.whitespace.characters must be deserializable to a char. We pad the tab character with spaces here:

helix/helix-term/src/ui/editor.rs

Lines 397 to 399 in 8a75795

	let tab = if whitespace.render.tab() == WhitespaceRenderValue::All {
	(1..tab_width).fold(whitespace.characters.tab.to_string(), |s, _| s + " ")
	} else {

which could be replaced either with a new padding character or the tab setting could be a string that gets truncated to the tab-width.