remove messy leading whitespace in VIM on OSX

Question

Hi,

I am copying code from website matplotlib and pasting into the vim editor in a terminal on OSX:

[(http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/pylab_examples/ellipse_demo.html)][1]

While this works fine in bbedit:

`from pylab import figure, show, rand
from matplotlib.patches import Ellipse

NUM = 250

ells = [Ellipse(xy=rand(2)*10, width=rand(), height=rand(), angle=rand()*360)
        for i in xrange(NUM)]

fig = figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, aspect='equal')
for e in ells:
    ax.add_artist(e)
    e.set_clip_box(ax.bbox)
    e.set_alpha(rand())
    e.set_facecolor(rand(3))

ax.set_xlim(0, 10)
ax.set_ylim(0, 10)

show()

ie all the code is properly aligned, in VIM it looks like this:

from pylab import figure, show, rand
from matplotlib.patches import Ellipse

NUM = 250

ells = [Ellipse(xy=rand(2)*10, width=rand(), height=rand(), angle=rand()*360)
        for i in xrange(NUM)]

            fig = figure()
            ax = fig.add_subplot(111, aspect='equal')
            for e in ells:
                    ax.add_artist(e)
                        e.set_clip_box(ax.bbox)
                            e.set_alpha(rand())
                                e.set_facecolor(rand(3))

                                ax.set_xlim(0, 10)
                                ax.set_ylim(0, 10)

                                show()

Anybody know how to fix this annoying situation? Does it have something to do with the different carriage return / line feed conventions on the Mac? Thanks.

Answer 1

Use the :set paste command before pasting the text. This turns off autoindent plus various other things that can interfere with pasting. To restore normal operation, use :set nopaste.

Answer 2

If you were using emacs, it would be a simple matter of M-x mark-whole-buffer and M-x indent-region.

Answer 3

If you have to, you could just use cat(1):

$ cat > newfile.py
Paste the code here, then press Ctrl-D for EOF.
Make sure to type EOF on an otherwise empty line
or bad things will happen to your children.
$ vi newfile.py

Should work.

Answer 4

Or use :r!pbpaste -- that inserts output from the pbpaste command (which happens to be the current paste buffer) under the current line; no need to mess about with modes and such.

Answer 5

As well as the :set paste command already mentioned, you can always do "+p to paste the contents of the clipboard into the current location. I've not used Vim on Mac OS X, but I'm sure this is still valid. On Linux, there's "*p for the selection clipboard and "+p for the copy-and-paste clipboard; on Windows, they both point to the system clipboard. "+p is a bit of an odd command at first, but once you're used to using this type of command, it becomes very quick. Alternatively you could use :put + to do the same thing.

:help quote
:help put
:help :put
:help registers