Tabs and spaces in vim

Question

How do I prevent vim from replacing spaces with tabs when autoindent is on?

An example: if I have two tabs and 7 spaces in the beginning of the line, and tabstop=3, and I press Enter, the next line has four tabs and 1 space in the beginning, but I don't want that...

Answer 1

Maybe the bottom of this can help you?

Standard vi interprets the tab key literally, but there are popular vi-derived alternatives that are smarter, like vim. To get vim to interpret tab as an ``indent'' command instead of an insert-a-tab command, do this:

set softtabstop=2

Answer 2

It is perhaps a good idea not to use tabs at all.

:set expandtab

If you want to replace all the tabs in your file to spaces (given tabstop=3)

%s/^I/ /

(where ^I is the TAB character)

From the VIM online help:

'tabstop' 'ts'   number (default 8)
  local to buffer
Number of spaces that a <Tab> in the file counts for.  Also see
|:retab| command, and 'softtabstop' option.

Note: Setting 'tabstop' to any other value than 8 can make your file
appear wrong in many places (e.g., when printing it).

There are four main ways to use tabs in Vim:
1. Always keep 'tabstop' at 8, set 'softtabstop' and 'shiftwidth' to 4
   (or 3 or whatever you prefer) and use 'noexpandtab'.  Then Vim
   will use a mix of tabs and spaces, but typing <Tab> and <BS> will
   behave like a tab appears every 4 (or 3) characters.
2. Set 'tabstop' and 'shiftwidth' to whatever you prefer and use
   'expandtab'.  This way you will always insert spaces.  The
   formatting will never be messed up when 'tabstop' is changed.
3. Set 'tabstop' and 'shiftwidth' to whatever you prefer and use a
   |modeline| to set these values when editing the file again.  Only
   works when using Vim to edit the file.
4. Always set 'tabstop' and 'shiftwidth' to the same value, and
   'noexpandtab'.  This should then work (for initial indents only)
   for any tabstop setting that people use.  It might be nice to have
   tabs after the first non-blank inserted as spaces if you do this
   though.  Otherwise aligned comments will be wrong when 'tabstop' is
   changed.

Answer 3

Here's part of my .vimrc:

set autoindent
set expandtab
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4

This works well for me because I absolutely do not want tabs in my source code. It seems from your question that you do want to keep two tabs and seven spaces on the next line, and I'm not sure there's a way to teach vim to accommodate that style.

Answer 4

If you want to replace all the tabs with spaces based on the setting of 'ts', you can use :retab. It can also do the reverse.