Find a solution to the indent level pain point

[syl20bnr]

Is there any package to address this paint point ?
Do we implement something from scratch in Spacemacs ?
I guess an alist mode . indent-level would be the most convenient.

[TheBB]

Editorconfig has this alist, which is fairly complete. I used it in my evil-shift-width layer to set that varible depending on the current mode's indentation settings. I think this is very close to a solution (both read and write indentation settings), but of course we can't get something that is both general and able to cover the advanced settings in a mode such as Haskell.

[TheBB]

I don't know how the UI for such a feature would look. I want to stress that we make it possible to opt-out of using this in certain modes, because some of them have very thorough and detailed indentation settings that we might not want to mess with (unless asked).

[syl20bnr]

I wonder if we could use the layer abstraction instead of the package. I believe I see this proposition pop out in the chat. Would make sense to have (layer . indent-level).

[syl20bnr]

Raising it as high priority because I can see in google that it is a very recurrent paint point for users.

[aaronjensen]

I came across https://github.com/jscheid/dtrt-indent which seems to work well and is pretty slick. It could likely be extended to support most major modes.

[a13ph]

Indentation style wars are second only to modal vs non-modal editing arguments. Well, maybe block style is up there too, but I've never heard anyone asking about that one.

And even if some projects use some special convention for indentation, most people probably have some preferred setting (their default for personal files etc), which can be asked about once easily - or be presented in homepage? toggles?... config file, I guess? Since many similar non-toggles go there.

Having specific settings for particular layers/mode/languages in one place would be nice and would probably require just finding all those disparate variables, so that'd be great to add. Not sure how hard it would be to make possible project-specific overrides though, but that does seem like up EditorConfig alley