Vi messes up my indentation

#1

When I use vim in its indentation-keeping mode, creating a linebreak automatically indents the new line to the beginning of the previous one.

Unfortunately, this feature is broken, because it replaces spaces with tabs according to an unknown space-tab relation that is only used by vim. That is, if a line is indented by a number of spaces, then a linebreak will result in the next line being indented by a number of tabs and a small remainder of spaces.

If I try to open the file in any other editor, there is a good chance that a lot of the lines are indented anomalously, as the editor spaces tabs differently.

Do you know of a configuration option I can use to get rid of this? Other than disabling auto-indentation entirely and indenting each line manually?

#2

You can set noexpandtab in your .vimrc or do it filetype by filetype with something like the following, which sets .make files to noexpandtab.

#3

Thanks!

Unfortunately I’m new to .vimrc, and I’m not sure what is stopping this from working. Here’s the file content:

$ cat ~/.vimrc set noexpandtab
Yet when I open a new file, type a lot of spaces and hit enter, the next line will still get tabs.

Am I missing something, or do I have to log in again for it to take effect?

#4

Oops, I’m a dumbass (but you knew that) and read your post wrong. I think you want the opposite of what I posted:

#5

set expandtab, actually, but thanks! It works fine now.

#6

OMG! I should just go back to sleep!

I’m glad you got it worked out and hope that I helped despite my gross errors. :slight_smile:

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