Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!cognos!donw
From: donw@cognos.uucp (Don Walker)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Re: Tabs and vi
Message-ID: <2318@cognos.UUCP>
Date: 22 Feb 88 16:47:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: cognos.2318
Posted: Mon Feb 22 11:47:29 1988
References: <20655@bbn.COM>
Reply-To: donw@cognos.UUCP (Don Walker)
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 28

In article <20655@bbn.COM> cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) writes:
>
>Two questions about tabs from within vi:
>  a) for a variety of reasons, I _despise_ true TAB chars.  Is there a
>  way to have vi _never_ use them (and just always use the right number
>  of spaces).
>  b) If I can't have (a), can I at least prevent vi from autoindenting
>  by using tabs?  I generally run along with :set ai, and the 
>  shiftwidth=4, and what it seems happens is that vi uses
>  a TAB character for every <shiftwidth> of indenting (which of course
>  looks _great_ once I go back to UNIX where the tab chars become 8
>  positions again. :-()

I work around b) by setting tabstop to some value that I will never be doing
autoindent at (I use set tabstop=80) and setting shiftwidth to the desired
indent value.  This gives you autoindenting without tabs.  It does have two
drawbacks:

1. Any documents that you edit that do contain tabs usually look very
fragmented.  This is usually easy to catch.

2. You can't use the TAB key.

-- 
Don Walker               Cognos Incorporated     S-mail: P.O. Box 9707
Voice: (613) 738-1440                                    3755 Riverside Drive 
  FAX: (613) 738-0002                                    Ottawa, Ontario 
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