[ILUG] [TOTD] emacs-like tabkey auto indentation in vim

[Dale Dunlea]

Any time I need to reformat, it's generally after pasting code or some 
such - after all, if it's code I've been writing, it will be 
auto-indented as I go along anyway. So for indenting a block of code 
that's just been pasted in, I find that ctrl+v, select the offending 
lines, and then '=' does the job.

That and I do some python coding, so with it's pathological indentation, 
it's nice to have the tab key for acutally inserting tabs.

Dale.

Stephen Shirley wrote:

> (Seeing as someone was looking for this earlier on irc (and hasn't 
> complained that it didn't work ,-))
>
> In emacs, if you hit tab on a line of code, it will indent the line to 
> the appropriate level, i.e. add or remove tabs/spaces as needed to 
> make the indentation consistent with the previous line. If you want to 
> do the same thing with vim, add the following to your ~/.vimrc :
>
>     imap <tab> <esc>==i
>
> This works as follows:
>
> imap: map the following key to the following action in insert mode
> <tab>,<esc>: the literal key codes, where <esc> in this case will exit 
> insert mode.
> ==: auto indent the current line
> i: enter insert mode
>
> Steve