Tab to indent no matter where in text

One small thing I love about iA Writer is that if I am typing and decide I want to indent the line, I can just hit tab and it indents the entire line, whether I’m in the middle of the sentence or before the dash in front. Would love if Drafts copied this behavior.

There are time when that wouldn’t be appropriate, such as when you were typing some tab separated data, or using it as a comment spacer at the end of a line of code (e.g. In a Markdown code block).

There is a standard indent action that can do this and you can add it to the extended keyboard row.

If this was to be inbuilt functionality, I would suggest it was an enable/disable setting like smart quotes.

As @sylumer mentioned, there are indent / outdent example actions which ship with Drafts. If you don’t have them, they can be re-installed from the action directory (Indent, Outdent).

By default these are assigned the keyboard shortcuts ⌘-[ and ⌘-]. These are the common assignments for indent / outdent in most plain text editors on Mac.

I’m not crazy about overriding the functionality of literal keys that type characters, because it disables your ability to type that character in the editor.

1 Like

Fair enough, makes sense. Perhaps my app is buggy but when I try to use that Indent feature mentioned, it ends up indenting and also highlight the entire line and also indenting text below it, which often messes with the formatting I already had setup. Not the end of the world, more slightly bothersome than anything. I will give the keyboard shortcuts a try on the iPad, though.

Thanks!

That’s very clear and makes sense. Thanks for the response!

@justin, I think I can reproduce what you were referring to with the indenting behaviour. I’ve created an alternate indent action that I think takes into account and addresses the sort of things you noted.

Would you mind giving it a try to see if it works more how you would want it to than the other one?

If it does, you can assign it to a keyboard shortcut, perhaps even the ⌘-[ replacing the other indent action for example.

At the moment I haven’t created an outdent equivalent, but it should be possible to do on a fairly similar basis (there would be at least one additional hurdle to consider in it) if the one above works.

Oh wow, thank you so much! This works perfectly! :pray:t2: