When you paste a block of text into a Putty window, many times you’ll get an increasing number of leading tabs. Not so if you use gnome-terminal (IIRC). Quite annoying in a Windows world.

Strip tabs and spaces out from current position to the end of the file with:

:.,$s/^[<tab>]*\s*//


Or perhaps you only want a small block in the middle of the file changed. First, turn on line numbers.


:set number


Then search and replace on specific line numbers (in this example lines 15 through 41).

:15,41s/^[<tab>]*\s*//


Then use Ctrl-V (down arrow or h,j,k,l keys to select block) and hit “>” to re-indent. Works much better than reformatting by hand.

On a slashdot thread I was discussing whether I should roll my own data structure or try to use one of the many, many Sun data structures.

Someone recommended this book.