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I know there's a way because it happened by accident. I was frenetically moving in a short region of text and at some point, with some wrong keystroke, the leading spaces on the line became a tab (and the cursor was not there, but more on the right).
Anybody knows has an idea what did I press?
I'm pretty sure I was in normal mode, and probably also that no special keys are involved, iIrc.
Could you have typed >>? This would indent the current line further, and under certain settings (mostly related to softtabstop, shiftwidth, shiftround, etc.) could change a space into a tab.
Obviously u undoes the change, but << is the counterpart.
For correcting spaces vs. tabs after changing the appropriate settings, use :retab[!].
>> intentionally, I believe. Close to it there's only z and a... Furthermore, >> would have indented. Instead the leading spaces (I don't remember if they were 2 or 4, I'll check tomorrow) converted all toghether to a single tab.
>> is the vi command to shift the current line rightward; the shifting is controlled by the sw (shiftwidth) setting. Of course > can also take other movements, so >G will shift all lines from the current to the end of the document; and >'x will shift all lines from the current to the x mark, and so on). Also < is the command to shift towards the left.
Apr 15, 2021 at 19:50
Normally I configure my vi/vim with
set expandtab
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4`
to "expand tabs" (to spaces), using "tab stops" of four spaces and the "shift width" also to four spaces.
To apply these changes to an existing file which already contains tabs I'd just use a common ex substitute command: :% s/^V^I/ /g
(Where ^V^I is Ctrlv (verbatim on the following keystroke) followed by Ctrli (the same as your Tab key on almost all systems), and the right hand side / / contains the desired number of spaces (four, in my case).
:s command for converting tabs to spaces, rather use :retab. It also supports the range argument.
Apr 16, 2021 at 11:16