umar
umar

Reputation: 4389

Indenting a bunch of lines in Vim

Is there a way to indent a selection of lines in Vim, like we have in text editors where we select a bunch of lines and press tab (or shift tab) to indent/unindent the selected lines?

I am talking about general indentation and not related to code indentation.

Upvotes: 28

Views: 18107

Answers (5)

jps
jps

Reputation: 946

There's a Vim Cast on this topic: Indentation commands

I like Vim Casts. They are informative and pleasant to watch.

Upvotes: 3

Peter
Peter

Reputation: 132217

You can select a set of lines with visual line mode (via Shift + V), and then type

>

and, to dedent,

<

You can also add numeric arguments. Find out you didn't indent enough? Hit gv to re-select your previous selection.

While typing in normal mode, try out Ctrl + T or Ctrl + D to indent or dedent.

Upvotes: 44

Brian Rasmussen
Brian Rasmussen

Reputation: 116401

Use visual mode as Peter suggests. You can also use X>> where X is the number of lines you want to indent. E.g. 5>> indents five lines from current line and down.

Upvotes: 20

Ton van den Heuvel
Ton van den Heuvel

Reputation: 10528

As suggested by the other answers you can use >. Alternatively, you can automatically correctly indent your code by selecting the set of line in visual mode (using shift+V), and then using =, or using == to indent the current line.

Upvotes: 3

Habi
Habi

Reputation: 3300

I use the following mappings to indent/unindent:

vmap <TAB> >gv
vmap <S-TAB> <gv

Use TAB to indent and shift-TAB to unindent the visually selected lines.

If a block is selected Vim indents/unindents what is right of the start of the block.

Upvotes: 11

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