iansjack wrote:
I think the penultimate sentence of your OP sums it up: "I don't know whether it will confuse the editor users."
If your editor's behaviour differs from other standard editors, what do you suppose the answer to that question is?
Is there a reason why you want this non-intuitive behaviour (other than to make the programming easier - which I'm not convinced it does)?
The other reason is, I think this behavior might not be important. I seldom typed a tab across line in daily programming, neither did I found some else.
I want to know how many people in the world need such broken-and-wrapped tab or often see it, so I wrote this post.
The only occasion I see is when I opened a source file wrote by another, and the column limit in his code style is longer than my terminal. But the first thing I did is to drag my terminal to adjust it.
A tab hitting the right edge of terminal will lose its layout meaning and whatever paint design can not save it.
As you said , breaking and wrapping it is a natural way. However, constraining it within current line is less natural but still reasonable, for I remember(not very clearly, it's a post on stackexchange) tab was not allowed to enter new line in very early age(seems also in XTERM today), may be for it got its meaning from tabulator.
If the behavior is really not important at all, I prefer the latter design.
Just like the cursor behavior difference between vim and emacs: when you click the screen area corresponding to a tab, emacs moves cursor to the first cell of tab area while vim moves to the last.