auto-indent

GNU Emacs is awful – it’s so slow it can barely even auto-indent my files, which is insane considering the horsepower it has to work with.

I have configured my text editor to put 4 spaces when I press the tab key and auto-indent with 4 spaces as well.

I do it for a simple reason, layout clean up with auto-indent.

If I had one wish for an improvement: auto-indent, etc.

A hint from how the Lisp Machine did quick auto-indent etc: it used doubly linked lines (each line had a link to the one above and below), and each included in its metadata a number for how much it changed the indentation.

I actually wrote a quick script that uses Emacs and web-mode to auto-indent collections of files, and it does a much better job than any of the alternatives I've tried previously (even if it can be a little slow on larger directories).

Maybe not necessary as fast as machines are today, but I found it pretty neat when I used the idea to make Goldhill Common Lisp's Emacs (an interpreter that ran on original formula IBM-PCs at the time) flash the opening paren that matched the one at the cursor (I think auto-indent was already there, but slow).

I'm tempted by emacs/evil as well, but everytime I try to make the switch I run into two problems: 1) intial emacs setup: it feels really tricky to just get basic editor sanity configured (auto-indent, syntax highlighting, etc.) 2) I worry that by using evil mode, I lose out on a lot of the goodness of emacs major and minor mode's.

Auto-indent will completely remove any manual indentation, however, which seems like something that should be fixed.