Nothing super crazy going on here, just info on stuff I use, build and things that annoy on a daily basis. Current goal is to blog once every 3 months

1. Decide if you want tabs or spaces

If you want Vim to indent with tabs add the following to your config

set noexpandtab " Don't expand a tab into spaces

If you use spaces instead of tabs add the following to your config

set expandtab " Expand a tab into spaces

2. Choose the width of your tab or spaces and restart Vim

If you selected tabs above, this will simply set the width of a tab character to the selected number of columns. If you selected spaces above, this will pretty much add that many space characters. Add the following config to set your tabwith. Feel free to change it to something other than 4 if desired.

let s:tabwidth=4
exec 'set tabstop='    .s:tabwidth
exec 'set shiftwidth=' .s:tabwidth
exec 'set softtabstop='.s:tabwidth

As a general rule tabstop = shiftwidth = softtabstop. Because of this, it’s best practice to create a variable (s:tabwidth) and assign the desired number of columns your indentation will represent. If you are wondering about the s: prefix read the help page :help internal-variables.

These three variables are actually there to fine tune your editing. There are some special cases where you might want them to be different, but them being the same is fine for over 9000% of people.

Check out my Neovim config if you want to see my settings. Pretty much all the settings should work if you are using any Vim program and here is a link to my dotfiles to see what programs and settings I currently run.