C Programming- Wrong forum, but where?: Generic IDE definitions?

[Kennedy]

C code is fairly generic. I code in K&R style, using tab stops (vim defines a tab as 8 space boundaries). Many editors, however, set the tab stops at some (please, no religious discussions about styles) other number. Thinking back to long ago, I remember something about putting magic above the code that would define all that stuff for some editors (GNU Emacs, etc).

Is there a generic set of parameters that one can put at the top of a C code file that would define the width of the line, the number of spaces/tab, etc?

A quick Google search revealed nothing, but I just cannot seem to come up with good phrases to search (I'm really bad at it).

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Mods -- If you move this message to an appropriate forum (maybe GD?) that's okay with me.

Thanks,
Andy

[Sebastiani]

Hmm, #pragma( tabstop, 4 ) didn't seem to work. In all seriousness, though, I have no idea.

[Salem]

No, there is no universal fix it for tabs.

Certain editors have particular styles of comment lines to convey the info, but unless you happen to also use the same editor (or one which understands the comment), it just doesn't work.

[Kennedy]

Well, there should be. I hate it when, in a peer review, the folks say "I really think that your \ should be in a single line on the right." Maybe we should put this into the C 2019 standard .

Thanks anyways,
Andy

[MK27]

You can set tabs to whatever you want in vim (:set tabstop=4) but then you want to make the shiftwidth the same if you use >> (:set shiftwidth=4).

Since this literally is a tab character (\t) that is interpreted by an editor, the only place this can really be an issue is in "cut and paste" situations where the tab will get turned into spaces. So it would be meaningless, I think, to attempt what you are talking about. A \t is a single byte in the source code file; it does not make any sense to say "make it X spaces instead", that's the realm of the viewer.