VIM stuff

This article will be updated continuously and will contain useful configurations, tricks, life-hacks for VIM editor.

Contents:

• Tabs or spaces?
• Display hidden characters

Tabs or spaces?

There are two functions that will setup respective formatting either with spaces or tabs:

function! UseTabs()
  set tabstop=4     " Size of a hard tabstop (ts).
  set shiftwidth=4  " Size of an indentation (sw).
  set noexpandtab   " Always uses tabs instead of space characters (noet).
  set autoindent    " Copy indent from current line when starting a new line (ai).
endfunction

function! UseSpaces()
  set tabstop=2     " Size of a hard tabstop (ts).
  set shiftwidth=2  " Size of an indentation (sw).
  set expandtab     " Always uses spaces instead of tab characters (et).
  set softtabstop=0 " Number of spaces a <Tab> counts for. When 0, featuer is off (sts).
  set autoindent    " Copy indent from current line when starting a new line.
  set smarttab      " Inserts blanks on a <Tab> key (as per sw, ts and sts).
endfunction

Add those to the ~/.vimrc file.

They can be called in the command mode:

:call UseTabs()
:call UseSpaces()

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/48390668/7551001

Display hidden characters

To display special/hidden characters like tabs, spaces, caret return and so on, use the next commands:

:set list
:set listchars=tab:→\ ,space:·,nbsp:␣,trail:•,eol:¶,precedes:«,extends:»

Source: https://askubuntu.com/a/1044625/965127