Disabling indentation for filenames without suffix

Question

VIM's Wikia documentation states that you can disable indentation for certain filestypes by inserting the line

let b:did_indent = 1

in the file ~/.vim/indent/<filetype>.vim where <filetype> is substituted by the filetype used.

What if I want this applied specifically to files without a suffix? What filetype does that constitute?

I have already tried using autocmd FileType let b:did_indent = 1 in my vimrc file, which doesn't work, as expected, since the blank space doesn't constitute no suffix files.

Note.

By indentation, I mean the behaviour that you get by having set autoindent inside your vimrc. I want this disabled for text-editing; in my case, files without a suffix.

Answer 1

Files without a recognized filetype do not trigger the FileType autocmd at all. Sometimes, but not always, this means files without an extension in their name. Filetypes and suffixes are different things. To be sure, you can do :set filetype? to see what the filetype is set to. If this is an empty string, then no FileType autocmd can be used.

It seems to me what you want is the following:

1. Files with a filetype get set autoindent

2. Files without a filetype (i.e., plain text) get set noautoindent

Thus in your vimrc, you can use:

set noautoindent
augroup vimrc_indent
    au!
    autocmd FileType * set autoindent
augroup END

The first set sets the global option value, which applies to all buffers unless otherwise stated. The second set sets the option for files with filetype.

See :help autocmd and :help augroup for the meaning of augroup and au!. Briefly, this pattern of wrapping an autocmd with augroup (vimrc_indent is a completely arbitrary string) prevents multiple instances of the same autocmd from being installed when your vimrc is reloaded.