75
votes
How to indent as spaces instead of tab?
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
" ...
- 6,270
62
votes
Accepted
How to indent as spaces instead of tab?
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 ...
- 7,830
37
votes
Displaying tabs as characters
Highlighting tabs
Temporary Tab highlighting
For occasional use, one can simply highlight all tabs in a document using the following search / command:
/\t
To remove the highlighting, simply type :noh ...
- 833
32
votes
Accepted
Setting TAB to 2 spaces
Have you sourced your .vimrc since making these changes? When having vim open just type source ~/.vimrc (assuming it is in it's default location)
EDIT: This could help too
- 491
17
votes
Accepted
Vim doesn't use the correct indentation in Python files
It gets reset by the Python filetype plugin; from /usr/share/vim/vim74/ftplugin/python.vim:
" As suggested by PEP8.
setlocal expandtab shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4 tabstop=8
This file is loaded ...
- 60.2k
15
votes
Accepted
What is the rationale for \r and \n meaning different things in s command?
At the most basic level, there's already an asymmetry between the search and replace portions of :substitute because the former is a regular expression and the latter is text, with specific additional ...
- 10.7k
12
votes
How to join lines without producing a space?
Another trick you may try is to use replace. Sometimes this might be useful.
%s/$\n//g
Scenario: Delete the last character and join with the next line:
%s/=$\n\(.\)/\1/g
For example,
xxxx=
123
...
- 231
10
votes
Accepted
delete entire line after first whitespace on every line
The two commands below will reduce every line to the first sequence of non-whitespace character followed by a space:
from
0.453945 -2.14126e-54 3.40152e-49 101325 214.355
to
0.453945 <-- space
...
- 37k
10
votes
Displaying tabs as characters
I personally like the use of the plugin indentLine, which displays a vertical line at indentation levels.
It is of great help especially in python, where the indentation is important.
Among other ...
- 929
10
votes
Accepted
How to remove Neovim trailing white space?
This should do the trick:
vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ "BufWritePre" }, {
pattern = { "*" },
command = [[%s/\s\+$//e]],
})
Be sure to read the h:nvim_create_autocmd() for ...
- 196
9
votes
Accepted
What does vim consider a paragragh?
You may want to move to the next section:
]]
Documentation:
:h paragraph
A paragraph begins after each empty line, and also at each of a set of
paragraph macros, specified by the pairs of ...
- 15.7k
9
votes
Accepted
vim search for arbitrary combination of spaces and tabs
If you're looking for a substitute command:
:s/a[ \t]\+b/c/
The default regex mode doesn't see + as an operator. You have to escape it to make it special.
You can also use:
:s/a\s\+b/c/
\s is Vim'...
- 24.5k
9
votes
How do I replace single whitespaces without affecting multi-whitespace such as indentation in Vim?
The substitution is easier to read with word-boundaries in my opinion, and very magic mode makes typing easier:
:%substitute/\v>\s+</_/g
- 24k
8
votes
How to split a line into multiple lines efficiently?
The easiest way I've found to split lines in Vim is the normal mode command gq (type both letters in quick succession in normal or visual mode).
In visual mode, it will split whatever is selected, in ...
- 113
8
votes
Accepted
SpecialKey foreground color w/ cursorline set
I've been struggling with that behavior for a long time.
Basically, the foreground color of SpecialKey on the current line is changed to the foreground color of Normal if:
the cursorline option is ...
- 37k
8
votes
Accepted
How to show illegal whitespace (such as unbreakable space) in source code?
List & Listchars
'list' is a boolean option that, when set, instructs vim to display whitespace characters. And it is completely customizable using 'listchars'.
For example, to show non-breaking ...
- 24k
8
votes
Accepted
Moving to the end of the last word on a line
g_ will to go to the last non-blank character of the line
For more help see :h g_
- 15.4k
8
votes
Accepted
What does breakat&vim mean?
It resets the breakat option to the Vim default: ^I!@*-+;:,./?.
Where ^I stands for the tab character.
You get the corresponding help paragraph with the :help :set-default command.
:se[t] {option}&...
- 8,365
7
votes
Accepted
Expand <TAB> into 2 spaces when and only when editing HTML
Put this in your .vimrc file:
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.htm,*.html setlocal tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2
Briefly, autocmds get processed when the specified events occur for the specified ...
- 19.1k
6
votes
How to add space around a symbol using vim?
I'm not sure why you don't want to use search/replace, but here's a reusable command:
command! HTMLArgEq %s/\s\@<!=\+\s\@!/ \0 /g
It uses search/replace, but you only need to create it once. ...
- 6,610
6
votes
Accepted
Stop vim from removing whitespace on save for diff files
Since there was nothing explicit in my .vimrc that acted on only-whitespace lines and the diff syntax file did no such thing either, this had to with my plugins somehow. I find out that I had an ...
- 1,013
6
votes
What is the rationale for \r and \n meaning different things in s command?
A NUL byte is a string terminator in C, and for this reason Vim uses this convention, described in the manual at :h NL-used-for-Nul:
<Nul> characters in the file are stored as <NL> in memory. ...
- 3,949
6
votes
Accepted
Moved from vim to neovim and now <BS> deletes 4 spaces at a time, instead of 1 as I'm used to. How to fix?
Neovim sets smarttab by default, which will cause this behaviour. Try turning it off:
:set nosmarttab
- 30.4k
5
votes
delete entire line after first whitespace on every line
If you wanted to delete entire line starting with a space, This pattern will be useful.
:g/^\s.*/d
g -global
^ - start of the line
\s - space
.* - anything after that
d - delete
If you want the ...
- 3,212
5
votes
Accepted
From a TextChanged autocommand event, how to get the range that has been changed?
Is your concern about performance? Calling out to Python code will add unneeded overhead that would make an attempt at performance optimization moot. In any case, you can get the boundaries with ...
- 6,610
5
votes
Accepted
How does vimscript know which buffer these buffer-local variables use?
if I have two files open, one with b:dostrip set to 1, and one 0. How does StripTrailingWhitespace know which buffer it's operating on?
b: always relates to the currently active buffer. It's exactly ...
- 60.2k
5
votes
Displaying tabs as characters
You may want to show tabs differently in a regular terminal and gvim.
set list!
if has('gui_running')
set listchars=tab:▶\ ,trail:·,extends:\#,nbsp:.
else
set listchars=tab:>.,trail:.,...
- 3,613
5
votes
Displaying tabs as characters
This can be easily achieved using listchars by specifying the tab as: ,tab:\ \ ┊,
By providing two escaped spaces in front of your tab declaration, vim will repeat the spaces. This is opposed to the ...
- 151
5
votes
What's the simplest way to strip trailing whitespace from all lines in a file?
Exapnding on Christopher Bottoms's answer a bit: Jonathan Palardy wrote a good article on this. In it, he writes a functions, Preserve(command), that preserves the state of the editor (mainly cursor ...
- 1,253
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible