Turning off auto indent when pasting text into vim

Question

I am making the effort to learn Vim.

When I paste code into my document from the clipboard, I get extra spaces at the start of each new line:

line   line     line 

I know you can turn off auto indent but I can't get it to work because I have some other settings conflicting or something (which look pretty obvious in my .vimrc but don't seem to matter when I take them out).

How do I turn off auto indenting when I paste code but still have vim auto indent when I am writing code? Here is my .vimrc file:

set expandtab   set tabstop=2   set shiftwidth=2   set autoindent   set smartindent   set bg=dark   set nowrap   

Answer 1

Update: Better answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/38258720/62202

To turn off autoindent when you paste code, there's a special "paste" mode.

Type

:set paste 

Then paste your code. Note that the text in the tooltip now says -- INSERT (paste) --.

After you pasted your code, turn off the paste-mode, so that auto-indenting when you type works correctly again.

:set nopaste 

However, I always found that cumbersome. That's why I map <F3> such that it can switch between paste and nopaste modes while editing the text! I add this to .vimrc

set pastetoggle=<F3>