Define Tab Behavior - Number of Spaces, hard tab etc.

[Matthew! 0]

Hi!

I come from a background where I would store all my personal notes in a text documents organized using directories.  I used my favorite text editor at the time to edit the notes.

One feature that is noticeably missing is the ability to define what a "tab" does in Evernote. I really want my tabs to be 2 spaces (i.e. 2 spaces for indentation), though I know some people like 4 spaces, 5 spaces, or even a hard tab character.  I would love to be able to define this in a global setting, so that when making notes on the mac I can simply press tab or space twice to do indentation in my notes.

An added benefit (for my use case) is that on mobile, indenting will be easier - two spaces instead of the regular 4.  It will also get the Evernote text editor closer to the fully-featured text editors that many programmers are used to.

Thank you!

[DTLow 5,736]

4 minutes ago, Matthew! said:

I used my favorite text editor at the time to edit the notes.

So why stop using your favourite text editor?

I find the Evernote editor adequate for basic notes but I prefer other editors for serious work

[Matthew! 0]

Just now, DTLow said:

So why stop using your favourite text editor?

I find the Evernote editor adequate for basic notes but I prefer other editors for serious work

Largely because of the features that Evernote provides around tagging and syncing.  Evernote does both these features seamlessly across multiple devices - which is why I switched from a plain text setup in the first place.

If you have a recommendation for syncing plain text notes with tagging, etc - I'd gladly consider switching to it!

[DTLow 5,736]

1 minute ago, Matthew! said:

Largely because of the features that Evernote provides around tagging and syncing.  Evernote does both these features seamlessly across multiple devices - which is why I switched from a plain text setup in the first place.

If you have a recommendation for syncing plain text notes with tagging, etc - I'd gladly consider switching to it!

I continue to use Evernote to store my notes. 

When I use a different editor, I store the file as an attachment to a note.  For example Word files for word processing; Textastic files for programming code.

[jefito 5,589]

10 hours ago, Matthew! said:

I come from a background where I would store all my personal notes in a text documents organized using directories.  I used my favorite text editor at the time to edit the notes.

It would be nice to be able to configure this stuff, sure, but I think that the problem here is that Evernote doesn't use plain old text, it uses a subset of HTML, with some Evernote specific additions. Default behavior for HTML whitespace (space, tab, carriage return, line feed, etc) is to collapse them into a single space character. That's why Evernote uses <div> to delineate line breaks, non-break space characters to emulate tab characters (3 of them, it appears, at least in the Windows client), and (e.g.) <div style="margin-left:40px;"> to implement indentation. You can see this if you examine a note that's been exported to ENML.

I'm not saying that Evernote couldn't improve, but it's just plain isn't a text editor; it's an Evernote note editor...