Vim tabs and spaces

Question

I want my vim indentation to work as follows: if I have

▷   ▷   int function(int x,▒int y, int z) {

and I press enter, I want to get the following:

▷   ▷   int function(int x,
▷   ▷   _____________int y, int z) {

Where "▷" is a tab and "_" is a space.

In other words, I want to use tabs, but if I have a linebreak in a place that doesn't add an indentation level, then the non-indented line should be aligned with whitespace.

This allows me to use tabs for indentation, but preserve formatting on non-indent levels so that formatting is preserved even if the tab size is changed.

So far, I have not found a way that this is possible with Vim. Preserveindent and copyindent aren't what I'm looking for. They honor expandtab, and I want to only use expandtab for indentation, and spaces for alignment.

Answer 1

According to the Vim Wiki, the Smart Tabs plugin will do this. I have not tried it myself.

Answer 2

Open your _vimrc file, and add the following at the end:

set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set smartindent
set expandtab "converts the tabs into spaces
set autoindent

Answer 3

Currently, this does not look doable in vim. You can either have tabs, or spaces, not both. Unsurprising, as the time for spaces over tabs is very language-sensitive. Consider: In python, how would you treat:

x = fn(abc, 'def', {
                       ghi: jkl,
                       mno: pqr,
                   })

Should you go back to tabs at some point? That would be ideal, but very context-sensitive, and wouldn't really work cross-language. Another fun example, in haskell:

data Something = Something { flag1 :: Bool
                           , flag2 :: Bool }
               deriving (Eq, Ord, Show)

Good luck with that one.

I've concluded that language-specific extensions would be necessary for this sort of functionality, unfortunately. If you know of a good way to do this, though, I'd love to hear it.