I doubt it’s the programming language (per se) that makes a difference. It’s probably the settings of your particular terminal, whether you are using tabs or spaces for indenting in NPP, and what the receiving application (not PuTTY; whatever program you’re running in the PuTTY terminal) is expecting and set up for. If I run vim on linux thru a PuTTY 0.67 SSH terminal, and paste from Notepad++ into vim with auto-indent turned off, I get exactly what I pasted (if auto-indent is turned on, vim adds extra indenting: this is an example of how settings on the receiving application can affect things).
debugging questions
In Notepad++, what are Settings > Preferences > Languages > Tab Settings > [Default] > Replace by space set to? unchecked (☐) or checked (☑)? What about for Tab Settings > Python?
in your existing NPP window, you can turn on View > Show Symbol > Show Whitespace and TAB, and look for a light-colored dot (SPACE) or a light-colored arrow (TAB) at the beginning of the indent lines, to see what the indent is for that specific file.
What program are you running in the PuTTY terminal, that you’re trying to paste into?
Try an experiment:
run plane-jane Windows notepad.exe
type in two copies of the example text (below)
once indenting using the tab character
once indenting using four or eight spaces
copy/paste each (one at a time) into the destination program in PuTTY
Do they both come out the same (whether both wrong or both right), or is one formatted correctly and the other not
if they both are wrong, then it’s likely an issue with either your PuTTY settings or with what the receiving program expects
if the tab-indented version comes out wrong, but the space-indented version is right, you’ll want to set NPP to convert TABs to SPACES
if the space-indented is wrong but the tab-indented is right (that would surprise me), you want NPP to not convert TABs to spaces
if both are right from notepad.exe, but it still pastes wrong from Notepad++, then there’s something magical going on with your copy/paste buffer, and you might want to try loading Notepad++ without any plugins (run notepad++.exe -noPlugin) and copy/paste from NPP again, to see whether some plugin is interfering with the Windows clipboard.
example text
def getWindDirection():
global lastwinddir
...
return
while True:
print
...
other suggestions
Instead of copy/paste from Windows::Notepad++ to PuTTY::OS::Application, would you be able to use Notepad++'s NppFTP plugin to edit remotely from Windows::Notepad++ to the filesystem on whatever server you’re accessing thru PuTTY? (Or, if you’re used to a standalone FTP/SFTP/… like FileZilla, how about editing on Windows, but then copying to the server using your external FTP program)
