Question

The SciTE text editor has an option in its configuration files called “tab.timmy.whinge.level”.

What’s the story behind this name?

As I understand it, “whinge” is a British-ism for “whine” — Google defines it as “complain persistently and in a peevish or irritating way”. So who exactly is Timmy, and what is he whining about? There’s got to be a story there.

It’s not really relevant to anything, but every time I see that option in the docs, I have to wonder.

Answer 1

According to the definitive source: Neil Hodgson, lead developer of Scintilla:

I shouldn’t have named a feature
after a real person.

The standard Python module for
checking indentation is
‘lib/tabnanny.py’ which was
implemented by Tim Peters.