Spike on auto indentation

[luabud]

#481

[DonJayamanne]

• Look into using regex based on python grammar

[jkyeung]

Um, what is the purpose of this issue? Is it to basically bring issue #481 back to the forefront? Is the term "spike" here the same as (or perhaps a more forceful version of) what I've often seen as "bump" on various forums?

I certainly would not mind if this was moved to the front burner.

In particular, the "fix" for backslash line continuation is broken. Issues #4241 and #4563 deserve more attention.

I think it is a fairly simple matter, actually. The on-Enter rule that was added to address #3284 was this (in extension.ts):

{
    beforeText: /^(?!\s+\\)[^#\n]+\\\s*/,
    action: { indentAction: IndentAction.Indent }
}

It has the fatal flaw that the regex is not tied to the end of the line. I think that whoever put this in (apparently proposed by @jakebailey) probably meant the regex to be

/^(?!\s+\\)[^#\n]+\\\s*$/

Technically, that is still wrong, because the Python interpreter doesn't allow whitespace after the line-continuation backslash. It would be more correct as

/^(?!\s+\\)[^#\n]+\\$/

Since this is such a simple change and would save so many people the countless small headaches of unintended autoindentation after strings that contain backslash-escapes, I implore the powers that be to please give this some attention.

[brettcannon]

@jkyeung Spikes are basically us putting in some research into how best to try and solve the problem.

[ericsnowcurrently]

@jkyeung, I've left a comment on #3284 referring to your comment here. :)

[ericsnowcurrently]

I took at look at the existing code. Without upstream vscode changes, there isn't a lot we can do there.

Here's one rule we could add that might help a little with the indent of closing brackets:

{
    afterText: /^\s*[)}\]]/,
    action: { indentAction: IndentAction.Outdent }
}