Strip off tabs in vim
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.
most of the time, highlighting the text in visual block mode and then pressing = works, too – it’ll be indented correctly afterwards.
Phil76, I couldn’t get your tip to work on a bit of XML text. Does it only work in certain situations or when vi thinks you are working in a specific programming language?