Editor Behavior

This panel controls stylistic editing options, as described below:

Automatically Indent New Lines

When enabled, a new line will be automatically indented to match the indent level of the previous line.

Use Spaces for Tabs

When the tab key is pressed, Simply Fortran will either introduce a true tab character or the specified number of spaces to reach the next tab stop into the text. If this option is enabled, an equivalent number of spaces is added rather than the tab character.

If the editor is currently in “Makefile” mode, i.e. the user is editing a Makefile, this option will be ignored, and true tab characters will be used.

Tab Width

The tab width specifies the size of either the tab character in the editor or the equivalent number of spaces if the Use Spaces for Tabs option is enabled.

Remove Excess Whitespace on Save

When enabled, any trailing whitespace on lines is stripped prior to writing the file to disk.

Map Grave Accent to Single Quote and Map Acute Accent to Single Quote

The grave and acute accents, which are sometimes readily available on certain keyboards, are angled to encompass text. The Fortran language, however, only accepts the apostrophe character as a valid single-quote character. To avoid confusion, these two accent characters can be mapped to an appropriate character that the Fortran compiler will recognize as a valid single quote when typed. These options only trigger when typing; paste operations or loading a file are unaffected by these options.

Fixed-Format Fortran Specific Behavior

Because fixed-format Fortran represents a somewhat special case in programming due to its significant leading whitespace, additional options are provided to streamline fixed-format programming.

Automatically Correct Tabs

When this option is enabled, fixed-format Fortran and Fortran source code conforming to Fortran 77 and earlier standards will be scanned for leading tabs and corrected automatically when loaded into an editor. Tabs were common in shifting code past the sixth column in fixed-format Fortran, but this methodology does not conform to Fortran standards.

First Column for New Line

When auto indentation is disabled above or a prior line contained a comment or line number label, the programmer often wants the next line to begin on the seventh column in fixed-format programming. This option allows the user to specify this column explicitly to avoid always starting in the first column, which is not as common in fixed-format programming.

Initial Tab to Column

Any tab keypresses prior to the column specified should move the cursor immediately to this specified column.