I have a frequent need to manually manipulate tab-delimited text for data entry and other purposes. When I do this, it helps if the text is aligned properly into columns. For example (assuming 4-space tabs):
# original format
abcdefghijklmnop field2
abcdefgh field2
abcdefghijkl field2
# ideal format
abcdefghijklmnop field2
abcdefgh field2
abcdefghijkl field2
I am very familiar with using the column
utility to columnize text this way, but the problem is that it uses spaces to align the columns, and I specifically need tabs. This requirement also appears to rule out the Tabularize plug-in.
Is there any way that I can columnize text with tabs specifically, either within vim
or at the shell? It looks like I might be able to do it with groff
/tbl
, but honestly I'd rather columnize it by hand than mess with that....