Visual Studio 2008 Emacs Mode

Question

When using emacs mode in Visual Studio 2008 the tab key no longer inserts tabs. It simply formats the current line. It is possible to remap tab to Edit.IncreaseIndent but this has many undesirable side effects. Has anyone else experienced this? If so is there a fix/hack?

Also I have noticed that the performance of the text editor rapidly degrades over time when emacs mode is enabled. It gets to the point that there is full second lag on the cursor updating. I suspect this has something to with the way the kill ring or Edit.EmacsSetMark is implemented since in the default mode Emacs.SetMark does not work.

Any thoughts or help with these issues would be great. Even just some other people sharing my pain.

Answer 1

I haven't tried it in VS 2008, but in most apps with emacs key-bindings, if you do a Shift-Tab it'll insert a Tab instead of indent. (Learned from using Vimacs plugin in Vim).

Answer 2

Try Ctrl+q TAB

I use it every day with no performance degradation in VS2008 SP1.

Answer 3

I'm using Emacs mode, and I've noticed performance degradation. Not sure if it's related though.

I wish emacs mode wasn't so buggy. Much improved since vs 2005, but sometimes simple commands such as ctrl-n and ctrl-p don't work (in aspx, for instance).

Answer 4

Not sure if this works in VS2008 but the workaround offered for the Emacs Emulation extension for VS2010 is this:

Known Issues

• Pressing Tab on a blank line will not add the proper indentation. The workaround is to add text to the line and then press Tab.
• Pressing Tab when Intellisense Statement Completion is active will not complete. The workaround is to use another completion character or Enter to commit.