Rule Suggestion: Convert between Tabs and spaces

[chrisgrieser]

First of all, thanks for the plugin! It's one of those little things saving a bit of time every day.

A rule that I would find very useful is the conversion between tabs and spaces. For me personally, this would be incredibly useful because all the notes I imported from earlier apps use spaces, but the various relationship line css snippets need tabs to work.

[platers]

Would this logic work?

For every line, count the number of leading spaces, spaces. Replace them with spaces/tabsize tabs.

[chrisgrieser]

I think so.

One consideration could be to also deal with cases where you have one more space than your tabsize, which would result in tab+space. But that would rather be another rule, I guess?

[chrisgrieser]

You can pass it in as an option, the user can set tabsize=2 in the settings. See the other rules for examples.

That would work, but it isn't ideal. Users might not consider that the tabsize set in the Linter plugin is independent from the tabsize set in the Obsidian main setting, leading to unnecessary confusion about the use of that rule

[platers]

I was thinking about your use case, when you are copying from external sources. It would be nice if the default tabsize was the obsidian tab size though.

[platers]

on the discord, found vault.getConfig("tabSize").

[chrisgrieser]

I have the rule ready, but I am a bit uncertain about the typescript part.

1. is this how you would do it in the rules.ts?

(text: string) => {
        let tabsize = vault.getConfig("tabSize"); // <- this the proper syntax?
        (...)
},

2. also, concerning the examples, how exactly do I have to write them, with the indention in the code of the rules.ts itself? or does the dedent already deal with that?

[platers]

You should test the tabSize syntax in obsidian. If you put the repo in your plugins folder, after you run npm run compile you should be able to activate it in obsidian and test it.

Yep dedent deals with it, its pretty smart about the indentation.

[chrisgrieser]

okay, I have a working solution ready, but there are two problem.

---

Problem 1: vault.getConfig("tabSize") does not work, when compiling, I get the following error:

(!) Plugin typescript: @rollup/plugin-typescript TS2304: Cannot find name 'vault'.
src/rules.ts: (654:23)

654         let tabsize = vault.getConfig("tabSize");
                          ~~~~~

I also tried adding import { App } from 'obsidian'; to the imports at the top of the document, but that did not solve it.

---

Problem 2: So what I did for now, was to simply use tabsize as an option, as you suggested before. npm run compile works fine and all tests are passed, however, npm run lint has – surprise – a problems with me having added tabs.

> obsidian-sample-plugin@0.12.0 lint
> eslint . --ext .ts --fix

/Users/chrisgrieser/Google Drive/File Hub/obsidian-linter/src/rules.ts
  674:13  error  Unexpected tab character  no-tabs
  676:13  error  Unexpected tab character  no-tabs

✖ 2 problems (2 errors, 0 warnings)

674:13 and 674:13 are, of course, exactly the two positions where I have inserted the tabs for the example. Naturally, removing the tabs for the linter causes the test not to pass. 😝

So assume you would have to change some linter configuration before I can commit this rule?

[chrisgrieser]

Well, at least problem #2 I figured out on my own by using inline comments to temporarily disable linting rules. Will be adding a PR shortly.