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I happen to work on code in which some modules use tabs for indentation while others use spaces. Many text editors such as Np++ has some sort of an adaptive tabbing feature, which use spaces for indentation if the previous line (or block of code) use spaces, or tabs as the case may be.
I haven't seen anything in vim like this. Is there any such plugin or setting for this?
433
Within Vim, type a colon and then "set tabstop=4" which will set the tabs to display as four spaces. Hit colon again and type "set expandtab" which will insert spaces for tabs.
Opening a tab There are a few ways to do this. Probably the easiest to remember is to run the :tabnew command while in normal mode. This will open a new tab with an empty buffer. If you want to edit a file in the new tab, you can run :tabnew filename and Vim will load the file in the new tab.
To easily change a tab-based indent to use spaces instead when 'noexpandtab' is set, you can temporarily set 'expandtab' and use :retab with a range. For example, to convert only the current line to use spaces, use :. retab .
tabstop. This setting tells Vim how many columns a tab should be made up of in the editor view, it takes care only of how tabs will be rendered and has no effect on the actual text.
I perfer to set my enviroment up like the below example demonstrates. I make a general rule of replacing tabs with spaces and use augroup when I need to override that rule. Makefiles are a good example of when you may require TABS and a cpp file is when you may require spaces.
" A tab produces a 4-space indentation
:set softtabstop=4
:set shiftwidth=4
:set expandtab
" replace tabs with spaces unless noted otherwise
" <snip>
augroup CPPprog
au!
"-----------------------------------
" GENERAL SETTINGS
"-----------------------------------
au BufRead,BufNewFile,BufEnter *.cpp,*.c,*.h,*.hpp set nolisp
au BufRead,BufNewFile,BufEnter *.cpp,*.c,*.h,*.hpp set filetype=cpp
au FileType * set nocindent smartindent
au FileType *.c,*.cpp set cindent
au BufRead,BufNewFile,BufEnter *.cpp let g:qt_syntax=1
" turn on qt syntax highlighting (a plugin)
au BufNewFile,BufRead,BufEnter *.c,*.h,*.cpp,*.hpp let c_space_errors=1
" trailing white space and spaces before a <Tab>
" <snip>
augroup END
" <snip>
augroup filetype
au! BufRead,BufNewFile,BufEnter *Makefile*,*makefile*,*.mk set filetype=make
augroup END
" In Makefiles, don't expand tabs to spaces, since we need the actual tabs
autocmd FileType make set noexpandtab
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