Hello.
There are a few kinds of Pico-8 programmers out there. Those who like tabs and those who do not.
I fall into the latter category. So - what is the best way to remove tabs ? Well sure you can do it yourself - or you can rely on my rusty trusty Pico-8 program to do it for you !
NOTE: This program should be run NOT online but in LOCAL mode as it saves a file to your hard-drive, the corrected .P8 file called, "notabs."
Now at first I was using an index to read the string, but of course numbers only go up to 32767 so I had to use a different method. The code now will accept a program of ANY size now. Quite nice.
To use you have a few choices. If you know for instance that the code does NOT use the shift letters to create the Up, Down, Left, Right and other fancy icons in the source, you can use good old notepad.
Load up the .P8 file there. Run my program. Then copy all of the notepad contents (CTRL+A) (CTRL+C) to the clipboard. This is important to do in this order as when you first run my program it CLEARS the clipboard data first.
Right, then press CTRL-V. Press (O) to accept and after a short moment, whammo, you have a newly saved file called notabs.p8l ... be aware there is a trailing "L" on the file !
Rename to take it out and you're all set. Now if it crashes because of hitting a custom icon or arrow key, you'll have to load the original P8 in a more robust viewer like FIREFOX as an offline text file.
THEN run my program, open the P8 as a local file in Firefox.Press (CTRL+A) (CTRL+C), return to my program, press CTRL-V, and the P8 it saves should then run perfectly.
There may be an easier way to do this - but not with Pico-8 I think. :)
Any way to LOAD a text data file would be awesome, don't think that's going to happen though.
HOPE THIS HELPS !