vim smart tabbing

Question

In emacs, whenever tab is pressed, the cursor moves to the appropriate location on the current line. However, in vim, this does not happen, the tab is a given length and will go that far every time I press tab. Is there a way to enable "smart tabbing" in vim?

Caesarism

Answer 1

I'm not exactly sure what behavior you expect, but this is probably it.

:set smarttab

Also consider setting:

:set smartindent
:set autoindent

Ramunni

Also :set cindent which, per manual, works sometimes better but is more strict. – Casar

Answer 2

I assume your question is the following. You have text like:

This is line 1

$ (lots of white space) This is line 2

This is line 3

Now, you are in normal mode, your cursor is after $, and you would like it get just before T. If so, just press 'w' (to traverse a 'w'ord) and you would achieve your objective.

Hunnicutt

I'm sorry, I should clarify, in vim, when appending a file, whenever I hit tab, can it 'auto tab' where it should be? Like in an if/else block, after the bracket, in emacs, whenever I hit tab, it will tab over until I am under the bracket or lined up with the line under the if statement. – Caesarism

Answer 3

Perhaps you just want to use == to auto-indent the current line.

Winterize