So my situation is that I have a file, myfile.py (written in python) that I started developing on my own machine. I used vim to do this, but at that time I did not know that Vim could let you define the length of your tabs, and also to show how many times the line had been tabbed by using a marker.
So before I SCP'ed myfile.py to a remote unix server and began working on it there, all my tabs were about 6 spaces in length each, and there were no markings defining how many indentations were present in a particular line. But since 6 spaces is a lot, there really was no need...
But when I began developing on the remote server, I noticed that their vim configurations had the tab so that it would be about 4 spaces in length each, and so that there would be vertical markings to show that a tab is present. However, it did not automatically change the lines of code that were already there in myfile.py to fit their tab-settings, and the settings ended up only applying to any new lines of code I wrote using vim on their server.
Being the newb that I was, I didn't bother to fix anything in order to make the file look consistent. Now I have some weird, interleaved-mixture where some lines have tabs that are 4 in length, others with 6, and the ones with shorter length have a vertical marking for each tab and the longer ones have nothing.
How do I efficiently fix this mess to revert back to one standard? (hopefully the one that has the shorter tab length with the vertical markings). I'm looking for anyone who has even remote experience regarding this predicament - whether this causes me to learn more vim on an advanced level, or start with some roundabout way first, I do not care. I just prefer anything over manually fixing each line - you know how wrong that could make your code when you're dealing with Python!
[EDIT]-> Also thought I should note that each line does not have the same number of tabs... some lines have 0, 1, 4, 5, etc etc...
:retab!
already?