CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimindentation
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Reputation: 4017

autoindent in vim for selected text

1) Is there anyway to autoindent/retab on a set of lines, rather than the entire file?

set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
set tabstop=4

has been defined in my .vimrc.

What I want is to select a bunch of lines and apply indentation only on them. This is because the file is large and I just want to clean my line of codes. By doing :retab, I would have to force the whole file to be reindented.

For example select the following code and reindent automatically

def hello(self):
 line1
 line2

to

def hello(self)
    line1
    line2

2) Is there any way that I can reverse tab? Something like Shift-Tab in Eclipse. It goes back 4 spaces.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 4842

Answers (4)

OrteipX
OrteipX

Reputation: 89

You can try this one...

Shift + V to enter in Visual mode

Then press j until you reach the text you want to be ident.

Finally press =, it will ident automatically your selected code.

If you want to ident the whole code just type gg=G.

Upvotes: 8

romainl
romainl

Reputation: 196896

Most (if not all) Ex commands take a range so you could just visually select the lines and do :'<,'>retab.

Or :12,16retab.

Or :.,+9retab.

And so on.

See :help :retab and :help :range.

Upvotes: 0

builder-7000
builder-7000

Reputation: 7657

What I want is to select a bunch of lines and apply indentation only on them

You can apply indentation to certain lines in Visual mode. To do this follow these steps:

  1. Position your cursor in the first line to be indented

  2. Enter visual mode by typing shift + v

  3. Move down, typing j until you reach the last line to be indented (alternately you can type line # + G if you know the line number of the last line to be indented).

  4. Type >

Another solution is to do this with a regex in command-line mode:

2,5s/\v(.*)/\t\1/g

Here the line range is specified in the first two numbers of the regex (in this case from line 2 to 5).

Upvotes: 1

DJMcMayhem
DJMcMayhem

Reputation: 7689

To answer both of your questions at the same time, you can use the > and < operators. Since they are operators, they behave just like y, d, c, and all the other operators do, so you must supply them with a motion. For example, >> will indent the current line (with 4 spaces), and >j will indent the current line and the line below. >G will indent everything to the end of the buffer, etc.

Similarly, < will unindent whatever you specify.

In your specific example, there are two different approaches I would recommend.

  1. Use normal mode. This one kinda depends on how large your function is. If it's just the two lines, you could put your cursor on line1, and type <j>,. (Of course, if your function has more than 2 lines, you'll need to adjust). Unfortunately you need to unindent before reindenting because otherwise you'll end up with 5 spaces, which I assume you don't want.

  2. Use visual mode. This one is slightly less convenient unless you modify your .vimrc because calling > or < in visual mode will drop your visual selection. That's why I have the following in my .vimrc:

    "Make it easier to indent a visual selection several times.
xnoremap > >gv
xnoremap < <gv

    With this setup, you can visually select the lines you would like to reindent, and then do <>. IMO, this is the best solution, and I frequently use this kind of workflow.

Upvotes: 0

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