For those who are tabs people like me

[octopusinvitro]

I've searched the issues but seems like nobody asked this.

I use tabs for indentation and spaces for aligning. When I run lessc, the output css uses spaces for indentation and for aligning. Is there any way (or modifier maybe?) to change the output so that it uses tabs for indentation and spaces for aligning?

Cheers!

[lukeapage]

Not at the moment

[lukeapage]

I wonder why you need it - do you edit your output css files?

[seven-phases-max]

I guess you should take a look at some "post-formatting" tool like csscomb.

[seven-phases-max]

@lukeapage It looks like we have now a lot of open issues for "preserve source formatting" (incl. those for comments) that mostly overlap each other. I feel like we can just merge all of them into some unified feature request: "total source formatting preserve" (incl. line-breaks) for further discussion and decisions (with #2099 (comment) as a starting point and probably marked for v3 :)

[lukeapage]

I was thinking about it recently and I don't know how you'd do it e.g.

.mixin() {
  color: red;
}
.a {
   .b {
      display: none;
      .mixin();
   }
}

becomes

.a
  .b {
    display: none;
  color: red;
  }

so I actually think there are 2 requirements

1. output formatting options (prob. not too difficult)
2. guess formatting options from input - if this was just tabs vs spaces and a few other things, again not too difficult.

Demand for (2) would probably dissipate if we allowed (1) so I'm thinking (1) is probably the way to go.

and I was wondering how difficult it would be to seperate out the toCSS into a visitor - then you could have the simple one and a plugin that was more complicated and did formatting (and if the nodes contained whitespace and someone wanted to write a output module that tried to preseve output they could.

If you have the time/feel like combining issues or closing duplicates then just go for it.

[seven-phases-max]

For your example I guess we'll just need to apply mixin call whitespaces to its contents (not counting that this has another trickery with "before or after" stuff).

---

output formatting options (prob. not too difficult)

And they will never be happy unless we have a dedicated flag for each tiny dot or comma (e.g.). Assuming this I'm starting to feel like having a csscomb plugin (just like those for autoprefixer or clean-css or something like that) is a way to go (though it won't solve comment issues).

[lukeapage]

@seven-phases-max that might be the most pragmatic thing to do

[matthew-dean]

Yeah, I don't know that "preserve source formatting" is wise (because they aren't the same before/after code), so much as post-format / output plugins, as mentioned.

[seven-phases-max]

In other words probably we can reject this feature at least: i.e. if we have --tabs than we would also have to have --spaces:n etc etc. and it never will stop :). So all or nothing.

[lukeapage]

merging to #2176