Vi and Vim Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people using the vi and Vim families of text editors. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am coding some html templates in JADE files. I want to auto indent code with spaces instead of tab. I tried shiftwidth=2, tabstop=2, but no matter what, it's still indents using tabs instead of spacebar, which causes the JADE compile to throw errors.
How can I auto indent large sections of code using spaces instead of tabs?
You are looking for the expandtab option. When this option is set, spaces are always used. You can put set expandtab in your vimrc to always have this option set when vim starts. If you want to only enable this option for specific languages, see this question. For help on this option, see :help 'expandtab'.
:set expandtab allowed me to use spaces instead of tabs for indentation
You want expandtab.
But there are usually a couple of options you want to set at the same time.
If you add the following to your ~/.vimrc file
" tabstop: Width of tab character
" softtabstop: Fine tunes the amount of white space to be added
" shiftwidth Determines the amount of whitespace to add in normal mode
" expandtab: When this option is enabled, vi will use spaces instead of tabs
set tabstop =4
set softtabstop =4
set shiftwidth =4
set expandtab
Alternatively you can execute these manually from normal mode by proceeding them with ':'
set autoindent is also nice in the real world... for code from the people who disagree with you... they are obviously wrong. Or for monsters that set their soft tabs to 3 or 5.
<tab>s are only expanded when pressed from keyboard, and only when at the beginning indentation part of a line? (so I can safely indent with spaces, but any <Tab> typed elsewhere than the leftmost indentation part, or already present in the file, are left untouched? ex: script using <Tab> in some parts ...)
Jan 25, 2022 at 15:27