How can I change the indent size?

Question

I just discovered I could indent and un-indent easily in Vi with : << and >>

By default it adds a tab character. Now I'm wondering, could this be to a number of spaces via a configuration in my .vimrc? And how should I do it?

Answer 1

Several settings controls the behavior:

First set expandtab allows to replace the tabs by white spaces characters :h 'expandtab'.

Then set shiftwidth=4 makes the tabulations be 4 white spaces :h 'shiftwidth'.

You could also be interested by by :h 'tabstop' which defines the number of spaces that a tab character in the file counts for.

As a bonus see :h 'smartindent' and :h 'autoindent' which are pretty useful.

Answer 2

I answered my need by modifying .vimrc like below:

:set shiftwidth=2
:set autoindent
:set smartindent
~

Thanks Sibi & satox

Answer 3

Yes.

You can set shiftwidth to any number of spaces. This works both in vi and vim.

:set shiftwidth=2

Now, the width shifted for each >> and << will be 2.

Answer 4

touch ~/.vimrc
echo "set ts=4 sw=4" >> ~/.vimrc

Shorthand for J.Chomel's answer.
touch will create the file .vimrc in your home directory if it doesn't exists yet
Next, append tabstop and shiftwidth with your preferences to the .vimrc file.