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Tab Vs Space preferences in Vim

Asked 2009-10-13T19:15:28.933
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Vim is very accommodating when it comes to tab Vs. space preferences. As I understand it, the tabstop setting indicates the width of a tab character. The shiftwidth setting specifies how many columns to increment/decrement when using the << and >> commands, whereas the softtabstop setting influences the amount of whitespace to be inserted when you press the Tab key in insert mode. If expandtab is on, the tab key inserts softtabstop number of space characters. Whereas with expandtab switched off, pressing the Tab key inserts a the smallest possible number of tab+space characters that matches softtabstop. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

This final point makes me wonder: is there a practical case where you wouldn't want shiftwidth == tabstop && tabstop == softtabstop? I can't think of one. As far as I am concerned, it would be most convenient if I could set all 3 of these to the same value, in one single assignment. e.g. calling:

:set stab=4

which would be equivalent to running:

:set tabstop=4 softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4

Can anyone suggest how this could be done?

UPDATE

Thanks for the replies so far from too much php, hobbs and kaiser.se. Rather than reply to each individually, I'm updating the question here.

Softtabstop with expandtab switched off

I said above that with expandtab switched off, pressing the Tab key inserts a the smallest possible number of tab+space characters that matches softtabstop. I stand by that, but I think I need to explain what I meant. I shall attempt to do so by way of a few examples. To follow along, run :set list so that you can see tab characters.

tabstop=4 softtabsto

vim whitespace preferences
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If expandtab is set then (as too much php points out), softtabstop becomes redundant. The only reason you might set shiftwidth differently from tabstop would be to cater to an odd habit; for instance, you use four-space indents but you prefer tab to insert eight spaces.

If expandtab is unset then things get fuzzier. If you want your code to look the same in with cat and non-vim editors as it does in vim, then tabstop should always be set at 8; in this case you would set softtabstop and shiftwidth both to your preferred indent level. If you instead prefer that every "physical tab" in the file represents one indent level, you would set tabstop and shiftwidth to your preferred indent level and leave softtabstop at zero (setting it equal to tabstop is equivalent except that if you change tabstop it will get out of sync, while zero just means "ignore this please").

answered 2009-10-15T11:59:51.040

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