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From: wyle@inf.ethz.ch (Mitchel Wyle)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: tabs in vi
Message-ID: <1108@ethz-inf.UUCP>
Date: 24 Aug 89 08:02:56 GMT
References: <7901@ardent.UUCP>
Reply-To: wyle@ethz.UUCP (Mitchel Wyle)
Organization: ETH Zurich
Lines: 25

In article <7901@ardent.UUCP> landay@ardent.com (James A. Landay) writes:
>Is there a way to make it so that when ever I hit the TAB key
>in 'vi' that I get 4 spaces rather than an actual tab?  I would
>rather not have to run expand after running vi, as I would only
>want to do that if I actually changed the file.

>landay@ardent.com

You probably want something more complicated than what you specified.
What you just specified can be done with

map! ^V^I <four spaces>

or abbr instead of map!

What you want is something which will ALIGN columns with spaces, using
tab-stops every 4 spaces.

I use tabs while I'm typing, then pipe the file through expand(1) to 
get spaces before saving or every so often.  I suspect that expand
can take params about how wide tab-stops are, etc.

Any solutions which are more elegant??

-Mitch