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I am a tabs kind of guy, I do not like when my code contains leading whitespaces instead of leading tabs. I often exchange codes with colleagues and I first have to convert the leading whitespaces to tabs manually before doing anything else.

Is there a way to search for whitespaces but not tabs in vim? My end goal is to write a script that will convert leading whitespaces to tabs automatically, but an answer to the above question will put me in the right track.

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  • / will search for single space (there's a space after slash)
  • /^ \+ will search for leading whitespaces
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In addition to @grodzik's answer here are two points that might interest you:

You can have vim showing the tabs and spaces characters. If you use:

set list
set listchars+=tab:>-,space:.

You'll see lines like this (Here the line begins with 2 tab characters and 4 spaces characters):

enter image description here

See :h 'list' and :h 'listchars'


Also about the transformation of the tabs to spaces the :retab command might interest you. From :h :retab:

With !, Vim also replaces strings of only normal spaces with tabs where appropriate.

Thus in a the buffer containing my previous example if I use :retab! I'll get:

enter image description here

You can imagine using the command in an autocommand for example to automatically convert your new buffers.

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