Tip #247: Preexisting code indentation

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Rating 17/9, Viewed by 1049

created:		May 17, 2002 0:46		complexity:		basic
author:		Riccardo Casini		as of Vim:		5.7

Using tabs as elementary unit in your code indentation has two advantages: first, you may modify 'tabstop' and immediately all the indentations depths are modified according to it; second, your file will be smaller. But how can we change some already-written code in order to convert spaces to tabs. Very simple! Suppose your old code has an indentation unit of 2 spaces :ret! 2 :x will replace every 2-spaces to one tab, independently from your current tabstop value, and will save the modified file. Then, if you open again the file with tabstop=2, the file will look as before but it will be smaller. If you open the file with tabstop=4, the code vill have a more indented look, and so on... Cheers!

<<Working with Unicode (the same, rewritten for legibility) | Auto-save the current buffer periodically. >>

Additional Notes

[email protected], May 17, 2002 6:08

Ehm, maybe... But what if you have two spaces somewhere in your code where it belongs (like, in a textstring or so)? I think you'd better unindent by removing all spaces at beginnings of lines (:%s/$\s+//g or so), be sure your tabsettings are good and gg=G your text to re-indent....

[email protected], May 17, 2002 6:10

Ehm... maybe gg=G is already removing all the whitespace at the beginning of lines before reindenting. Dunno exactly (too lazy to find out :) )

informatik.hu-berlin.de: piefel, May 23, 2002 7:04

Changing tabstop is always asking for trouble in my experience. There will always be people who open your file with a different tabstop (or just the default 8) and then write new code using spaces to indent. Et voilà, your formatting is busted. Try softtabstop instead. Use modelines. Don't just change tabstop.

Anonymous, October 17, 2002 10:15

I always use 2 commands to avoid reformatting double spaces inside the valid code... :s/^ /^I/ Then :s/I /^I^I/g




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