I've just moved to jedit from Textpad. I've been trying to find something that runs under Linux that is close enough to Textpad that I can use it. jedit appears to do most of the things that I want, however there is one thing that is really annoying me in the way that jedit works. Note: I'm using jedit primarily to develop in PHP.

Basically, it's the auto-tabbing functionality. My style of tabbing is to use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. For example, if I'm writing a line that declares an array with some elements, I want to put each element of the array onto a seperate line to make the code more readable. I want the elements to align vertically for easy reading. Each of these lines is tabbed to the same level as the first line, and then aligned from there with spaces. This means that anyone can view the code with their preferred tab size and everything still lines up as originally intended. If spaces or tabes are used to both align and indent, one of these conditions is not met (if you only use spaces people can't view the code in their favoured tab size: if you only use tabs things don't align in tab sizes other than the one used by the author).

Anyway, the upshot is that I end up with lines that start with a number of tabs followed by a number of spaces. The problem is that in jedit when I press return to start a new line, jedit converts most of the spaces into tabs, meaning I have to delete them and add the spaces I want manually. To make matters worse, if I press tab jedit does it again, and created the extra tabs that I don't want. Textpad would simply repeat the same tabbing as the previous line, which is exactly what I want.

I've looked through the options of jedit and can find no option to turn this off. Does anyone know if one, and if not how hard would it be to add one?

Oh, I'm using jedit 4.1 final.

Thanks a lot!