Sublime Forum

**eproxus** · February 12, 2016, 5:35pm

The View.insert et al. commands changes indentation of inserted text, for example when "translate_tabs_to_spaces" is set to true. This makes it impossible to create plugins that insert very specific characters, like version control plugins or search and replace plugins.

Possible solutions: either the commands should not manipulate the text, or there should be a more basic edit command that inserts text verbatim.

See https://github.com/gornostal/Modific/issues/101

Is there a way to insert text so that it is not changed by Sublime Text itself?

I’m using Sublime Text Build 3102 on OS X 10.11.3.

**sanya-g** · February 10, 2016, 10:32am

Can reproduce on ST3 Build 3102 running on Ubuntu 15.10.

**FichteFoll** · February 10, 2016, 5:08pm

edit_view is a command implemented by the Modific package, so this report is kind of misleading. The actual issue is as follows:

If "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true is set, every literal tab character (\t) gets replaced on text insertion - on the lowest API level, which is View.insert or View.replace. It also happens with the insert and append commands.

The same applies to the auto_indent setting, by the way, which also annoyingly auto-indents all code as if it was inserted literally, even if you pre-formatted it already. You can see the effects of that here:

The current workaround involves unsetting these setting before inserting your pre-formatted text, as I did here:

github.com

FichteFoll/CSScheme/blob/552d3a49e8429a065dee42fb24abd23d629ecb2d/convert.py#L187-L191


# The 'insert' and 'insert_snippet' commands and View.insert
# respect auto-indentation rules, which we don't want.
v.settings().set('auto_indent', False)
set_text(v, csscheme)
v.settings().erase('auto_indent')

**eproxus** · February 12, 2016, 5:35pm

Thanks, I’ve updated the original post to reflect the Sublime Text commands instead.

View.insert changes indentation of inserted text