converting tabs to spaces in vi
This is mostly for my own personal reference - just one of those little things I use frequently and always forget how to set up:
If you're writing Python, then you know that indentation is, uhm, somewhat important. Mkay. I use four space indentation as a standard, but it's kind of a pain with vim, and my space bar is wearing out (one more reason to keep things nice and DRY though).
Anyway, to save myself a few keystrokes and a lot of aggravation, I just added a line to my vimrc:
If you're writing Python, then you know that indentation is, uhm, somewhat important. Mkay. I use four space indentation as a standard, but it's kind of a pain with vim, and my space bar is wearing out (one more reason to keep things nice and DRY though).
Anyway, to save myself a few keystrokes and a lot of aggravation, I just added a line to my vimrc:
sudo vi /usr/share/vim/vimrc
set softtabstop=4
Foobar - 2008-11-09 10:51:18
Justin, :help retab does exactly that
garrat - 2009-11-30 15:51:47
that's handy and all but it's not converting tabs to spaces, it's simply setting the tab size to 4...
to convert tabs to spaces you use :set expandtab
and to turn spaces to tabs you :retab!
only problem is, which is why i stumbled across this page... if you have expandtab set in .vimrc it doesn't count for auto-indents.
yet every page I have read has no simply command for converting tabs to spaces. But I assure you this is a simple regex pattern to do this... annoying everyone is hailing the same buggy command :(
Justin Lilly - 2008-11-08 00:22:52
I also have a function that does it too.
map ,ft :%s/ / /g<CR> " replace all tabs with 4 spaces
for files you didn't write to start :)