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POWhat is the proper way of indenting Erlang?
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copied!<p>Till yesterday, I was a happy user of out-of-the-box emacs + erlang-mode. Then my colleague started contributing to the project (using some windows editor), and it seems he is not very happy with the mixed indent mode used by default by erlang-mode. Here is an example. This a part of a function, written using auto-indent on erlang-mode</p> <pre><code>handle_info(get_gss_latest_versions, State) -> GetReqIds = fun(Branch) -> GetInfoUri = State#state.gss_uri ++ Branch ++ "/api/getinfo", case ibrowse:send_req(GetInfoUri, [], get, [], [{stream_to, self()}]) of {ibrowse_req_id, ReqId} -> {ReqId, Branch}; {error, Reason} -> </code></pre> <p>If you take a closer look, you'll see that line 2 (starting with GetReqIds) is indented with 4 spaces. Line 3 is indented with 3 tabs. Line 5 is indented with 3 tabs + 4 spaces. Line 6 is indented with 4 tabs. As a result, most (dumb) editors (unlike emacs) display lines 5 and 6 (the ones starting with {ibrowse and {ReqId) at the same indentation level. Which looks ugly. (even stackoverflow shows them that way). </p> <p>I had a look at several prominent erlang softwares (like gproc) and most of them seem to use spaces-only indentation mode.</p> <p>So my questions are:</p> <ol> <li>Am I doing it wrong (seems likely to me).</li> <li>If spaces-only is the predominant indentation way, why is erlang-mode not implementing it (or not configured to using it by default)?</li> <li>How can I configure erlang-mode to force spaces-only?</li> <li>What's the "right way" after all? Things like cross-editor compatibility seem to matter, and we can't make all editors as smart as emacs.</li> </ol>

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