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Vim is adding lots of spaces and newlines when copy / pasting. This is what it looks like:

http://i.imm.io/vEiu.jpeg

How do I fix this?

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Have you tried to copy and past the code onto another editor, and see if the new empty lines appear? – Zuul Jul 8 '12 at 19:37
@Zuul The same happens in nano. – HappyDeveloper Jul 8 '12 at 19:39

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Gedit is using 4 spaces per indent, your VIM looks like it's using 8 spaces per indent.

There's nothing wrong, just a simple setting difference.

Look up the options:

  • shiftwidth
  • softtabstop
  • tabstop
  • expandtab
:set sw=4 sts=4 ts=8 et

will make your VIM look like your Gedit.

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My gedit is not using spaces, only tabs. – HappyDeveloper Jul 8 '12 at 19:34
I understand that.... and your gedit is EMULATING a tab with 4 spaces... while vim is doing the same with the default 8. A tab is a tab is a tab... until you display it and it is parsed by the output routine. gedit is using 4 character widths, while vim is using 8. The settings I showed will fix it. – lornix Jul 8 '12 at 19:41
I tried it, but it turned tabs into spaces, which I don't want. And the newlines are still there. – HappyDeveloper Jul 8 '12 at 19:44
1  
oh, sorry, make that a 'noet' rather then 'et', to each his own. The newlines are likely from gedit and the 'set paste' option, and if you copy/pasted this from a website, it probably has BOTH cr & lf (from windows!), which causes the double cr on linux. gedit got the original paste, so it handled the dos/windows line endings. vim is getting an anonymous paste, so it has to handle what it gets, there's no clues. – lornix Jul 8 '12 at 19:46
Yep, seems like there was some crazy characters in the file. I rewrote it and now it works fine. Thanks! – HappyDeveloper Jul 8 '12 at 21:01
up vote 1 down vote

I assume you're pasting from the clipboard or something? Try :set paste before pasting.

The first thing I do on any new machine is put set paste in my vimrc. I prefer paste mode as the default behaviour.

Edit: And you can use :set nopaste to turn paste mode off and the auto-format back on.

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It didn't work. Now it says 'INSERT (paste)' but the pasted text looks the same. I'm copying text from gedit, then pasting into vim. – HappyDeveloper Jul 8 '12 at 19:16
Hmm, that is strange. Only time I have seen that type of behaviour is when not in paste mode, if the encoding is "special" (UTF8/16, etc), or if a vim plugin/script is causing the issue. – CR. Jul 8 '12 at 19:26
up vote 1 down vote

you probably have vim's autoindent mode on. try turning it off with :set noautoindent

also, as mentioned by CR above, :set paste greatly improves vim's behaviour while pasting text into it...with paste mode set you don't need to mess around manually setting text-width, wrap-margin or anything else likely to mess up long lines or text spacing. remember to use :set nopaste when you've finished pasting.

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