Moving over tab spaces in ncurses

Question

I am creating a basic text editor using ncurses. It can display text fine, but navigating with arrow keys causes a problem when tabs are encountered. Calling move(y, x) will freely move the cursor onto a tab space, where most text editors will jump to the next character. Is there functionality within ncurses to jump over tab spaces or do I need to find a way to do it myself?

I think that if you want to support different tab sizes, you need to do it yourself. — Bartek Banachewicz

Thomas Dickey Thomas Dickey · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-19T20:39:48

You have to do it yourself: wmove moves to the given coordinates, ignoring the way characters are displayed on the screen.

If a destructive (filling with spaces) tab works for your application, then you could use waddch:

If ch is a tab, newline, carriage return or backspace, the cursor is moved appropriately within the window:

Tabs are considered to be at every eighth column. The tab interval may be altered by setting the TABSIZE variable.

For an editor, you probably do not want that behavior (though it probably would be helpful to use the TABSIZE feature when displaying text).

Moving over tab spaces in ncurses

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