How to convert leading spaces to tabs?

Question

Many people use spaces rather than tabs. I use both of them. Tabs at the beginning of line and spaces from the first non-whitespace character. No problem for starting new document and in case I have to modify one better adapt to using format. Still sometimes I need to fix the spaces issue anyway.

According to Search and replace I can just do :%s/spaces_for_tab/tab/g. It is simple and it will work for many cases. Anyway I want to refactor only spaces at the beginning of line.

Answer 1

This is more of a regex issue. To anchor at the beginning of the line, use the caret, e.g.

s/^        /\t/

Or do it using vim's builtin functionality:

:set tabstop=4  "four spaces will make up for one tab
:set noexpandtab  "tell vim to keep tabs instead of inserting spaces
:retab            "let vim handle your case

By the way, I too prefer tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. Unfortunately, vim doesn't handle this well (and I don't know what other editors do), so I mostly use :set expandtab (maybe see :set softtabstop).

Answer 2

I've written a simple func for it. Anyway it will work only for 4-space tab.

fu! Fixspaces()
        while search('^\t* \{4}') != 0
                execute ':%s/^\t*\zs \{4}/\t/g'
        endwhile
endfu

You can suggest better solution, if exists, and I will use it with pleasure. The issue is that this func replaces spaces in strings as well.