Vim replace space with tab. answered Feb 2, 2011 at 22:31.

Vim replace space with tab You can use : Summary: Learn how to replace tabs with spaces in Vim, a powerful text editor, using simple and effective commands. I've tried the following VIM functions FYI, see unexpand to do the reverse, convert multiple spaces to tabs. Now you can type a line containing mixture of both spaces and Tabs with length greater than which tabstop is set, without worrying some spaces become \t. However, sometimes, the requirement is to replace multiple spaces with a single TAB character. Whereas you needed to multiply the number of spaces with size of tab, you need to divide the number of tabs. 518K · joe_james. To remove only the horizontal spaces, we use the \h token that represents the space and tab characters. For converting indentation. This is set with the 'softtabstop' settings if I am right. Viewed 12k times If I read that correctly, then your replacement is a space. I can't do :%s/^ /^I/g bc this replaces only the first two spaces of each line, not each level of indentation. RetabIndent Execute Space2Tab (if Vim provides :retab! command which will replace all sequences of <Tab> with new strings of white-space using the new tabstop (e. Because I explicitly tell vim to replace only those adjacent spaces who follow a non-whitespace character If \s matches tab, then \2 must be tab, no space, and vice versa. trailing at the end of lines. I like to use spaces for indentation rather than tabs; replacing tabs at the beginning of a line is easy in sed or vim: s/^I/ /g But if there are tabs within a line (pretend the spaces are the width of the tab char): 'foo'^I ^I => 'bar', 'bazzle'^I => 'qux', Each tab doesn't correspond to a set number of spaces to maintain the alignment. But if there are line with one and lines with more tabs at the beginning, and lines with tabs in the middle, and I want to replace each tab in the beginning of a line with spaces to Let's just say that I often find myself in a situation where I have to replace the leading tab characters of each line with spaces. dots/periods. I thought of this because I recently needed to convert all tab characters in a file with two spaces (I was converting some Java code someone gave me to standards that I follow). How do I make it work for 1 to ∞ indentation levels? So that it replaces 12 spaces with 3 tabs (assuming a tabstop of 4)?. I want to auto indent code with spaces instead of tab. If the 'expandtab' option is on, Vim uses only spaces. Since I mix tabs and spaces depending on logical indent (tabs) and alignment (spaces), this gets really annoying. py. So I want to do something like :s/\\r/<CR> but actually insert a carriage return (0x0d) instead of a line feed (0x0a). These commands are provided: Space2Tab Convert spaces to tabs, only in indents. So, the size of tab is &tabstop, or &ts. set expandtab . Understanding Vim‘s behavior helps configure tabs and spaces to suit your needs. Perl worked worked with only the addition of a '+' to the regexp. The below snippet works, but only for the first indentation level. i add this config in Is it possible to make all leading groups of four spaces behave as if they were 8-width tabs? E. The Vim Fandom tutorial provides more information on using substitute for commenting Vim may replace some <Tab> characters with spaces to make this happen. Tags: shell spaces tabs. vimrc set softtabstop=2 set expandtab. This can be easily achieved using listchars by specifying the tab as: ,tab:\ \ ┊,. Although it may be good for a quick check, if Replace tabs with spaces in vim. Now I want to inverse it: replace n four-spaces with n tabs, I think the command should be :%s/^\v( )*/\=repeat("\t",strlen(submatch(0)))/g, but it doesn't work: if there is one four-space, it will be replaced by four tabs after executing the command. Improve your code formatting and maintain Vi/Vim: Replace tabs with spaces in vim; Expand tabs to spaces in vim only in python files? Use Vim Retab to solve TabError: will replace tabs with spaces, assuming tab stops every 8 characters, in file. Reinstall plugins. You can use sed to replace a number of spaces with a tab. Both expand and unexpand support using fixed-width tabs (e. Follow answered Nov 24, 2012 at 6:07. mvp mvp. , replace the empty string at the beginning of the line with a tab. Opened a file with tabs used instead of spaces? Even just one or two? Instead of feeling like an ogre on a Yes! remove the formatting_options from format(). It will alter every file you open automatically. Another option is to insert a huge number of spaces, and then use Visual Block with < operator as many times as necessary, if you have to do it once. If I remove the ! at the end of retab, spaces are not replaced anywhere. sdp sdp $ tr " " "\t" < input. vim; set noexpandtab "tell vim to keep tabs instead of inserting spaces :retab "let vim handle your case By the I have always been one to replace TABs in VIM with x amount of spaces (usually 4). However it's trivial to add this, I need to replace a slash character with a tab to I can extract a directory name using awk. By Alvin Alexander. Use :SPUpdate command to update all the plugins and SpaceVim itself. Q: How do I replace tabs with spaces in Vim? A: To replace tabs with spaces in Vim, you can use the following steps: 1. How can I achieve this? Thanks in advance. (which is the case when we're not handling the first line), do s/^/\t/-- i. If you Now the substitution will replace one space followed by one whitespace of any kind (space or tab) with \n. Bash Linux ubuntu vi vim. How to replace . You may not post attachments. Popularity 10/10 Helpfulness 10/10 Language shell. To get a newline, use \r. vimrc:" enable filetype detection: filetype on filetype plugin on filetype indent on " file type based indentation " recognize anything in my . Load the file in vim, make sure you're at the first line (1G), then filter the entire file: !Gpr -e4 -tenter. vim or Tabularize. Follow edited Feb 2, 2011 at 22:45. And you can use the :retab command to convert all existing tabs to spaces. How can I convert leading spaces to tabs in Vim or Linux? 1. g. It is clear from their attempted command that they don't want multiple consecutive commas in the resulting text, even if there are multiple consecutive spaces or tabs in the original. This doesn't answer your question, in ubuntu: vi Makefiles replace space by tab (or anything else you want)::%s/<space chars>/^I/g For ex replace 8 spaces by tab: But the problem I'm running into is it's replacing all instances of 4 spaces to tabs throughout the entire file. Follow edited Feb 16, 2020 at 11:53. And if I want to replace the ones at the beginning of each line, not the one in the middle I can do %s/^\t/ /gc. 3. fun! I would like to trim the following string: &lt;tab&gt;PACKAGE MAIN (the string starts with a tab space) The goal is to get only PACKAGE MAIN as an output. In NORMAL mode, type /\t and hit <Enter>. Use the following command - I am coding some html templates in JADE files. 1. Conclusion. IvanGoneKrazy How do I replace whitespaces with tabs in linux in a given text file? Skip to main content. This changes every 2 spaces to a TAB character, then::set ts=4 sts=4 et :retab This changes every TAB to 4 spaces. How could I replace these tabs with appropriate number of spaces so that the columns are arranged just like above, thus not altered at all. It will search for the Tab character (\t) and highlight the results. All other text editing software I'm familiar with uses this, but vim does not. Use Tab to complete plugin names after :SPUpdate. Your solution is easy to remember. Vim is the most popular command-line text editor. Replace tabs with spaces in vim. For Python code, you should simply replace all tabs in the code with eight spaces, since that was how the interpreter was More Related Answers ; vim tab 2 spaces; vim replace tabs with spaces; vim change tab size; vim replace across files; vim set tab to 4 spaces; vim convert tabs to spaces Vim doesn't do this natively, but there may be plug-ins that can help at %s/ /\r/g. Replacing Spaces with Tabs. Then there's the remainder to take care of. Then you can use ">><<" to replace <Tab>s in the indent by spaces (or use :retab!). So replacing all tabs in a file with spaces is not hard. vimrc config file are: set tabstop=4 set shiftwidth=4 set expandtab syntax on vi/vim search and replace: how to replace all tabs with spaces. bak, just in case). By providing two escaped spaces in front of your tab declaration, vim will repeat the spaces. Otherwise, pressing <Tab> inserts as many tabulation characters as possible, and complete with space characters up to the indenting width. You can use the evaluation register to replace any number of tabs with the appropriate number of spaces. 45 Quickest Way to Revert Spaces to TABs in VIM. I'm not sure why it's applied to leading spaces. Four lines I almost always use in my . 6. txt The^I^Iquick^I^I^I^I^Ibrown^I^I^Ifox^I^I^Ijumps^I^I^Iover ^I^I^Ithe^Ilazy^I^I^I^I^I^I^Idog. When a When in insert mode a setting of yours makes tab to reach a n th column. Ask Question Asked 11 years ago. Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. For example: 12\tabcd 1234\tabcd should expand to the correctly aligned: 12 abcd 1234 abcd but the given sed command will incorrectly expand to this misaligned output: I copied the following to vim. This is weird that I used to make it work with my vimrc setting to replace every tab with two spaces, but it doesn't work now. -t 4,12,32). You can In vim or sed or generally using regular expressions. In previous versions (when the question was written), it did not offer a modification for all spaces: a blank square is a space, period. editorconfig in the root folder of your project and put the following inside the file as an example: # EditorConfig is awesome: https://EditorConfig. Use \s instead of a space if you want to include tabs, too. Vim: tab-align multiple lines? 0. For example: Explanation: While copying, the existing TAB characters have been replaces with spaces, due to the below lines in the . This will make both auto-indentation and Tabs you manually typed to only spaces. Had a similar problem with replace consecutive spaces with a single tab. You can convert tabs to spaces in vim using the vim search and replace command. See If the file contains n number of line and contains spaces at the start of each line, end of each line and in between. Tab2Space Convert tabs to spaces, only in indents. #whitespace. set noexpandtab to. : Example to replace one-or-more-spaces with one tab: cat spaced-file | sed 's/ \+/\t/g' > tabbed-file Share. While these are all, obviously, valid solutions, in my case I just Remove only the horizontal whitespace characters: spaces and tabs; All whitespaces, including all vertical line breaking characters, in this case the empty lines are removed from the text as well. Then set shiftwidth=4 makes the tabulations be 4 white spaces :h 'shiftwidth'. Collaborating with other developers often means that not everyone is on the same side of the "tabs vs spaces" debate. Vim replacing tabs with double spaces. set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 set softtabstop=4 expandtab smarttab Is it possible to replace these spaces with TAB character again? Currently, the copied version has problems when reading using pandas' read_csv() function. answered Feb 2, 2011 at 22:31. See :help :substitute for reference. Now I want to delete all . Just go into "last line mode" by typing the ":" character, then enter a command like this to replace all occurrences of You can convert tabs to spaces by doing the following: First check that expandtab is switched off:set noexpandtab Then:retab! which replaces spaces of a certain length with tabs. md. That. -t 4 or -t 8, etc) or a list of tab positions (e. vimrc file. dimitar Replace tabs with spaces in vim. And \s\+ if you want it to replace consecutive spaces and/or tabs with one newline. So how do I insert an actual carriage return character as part of the substitution? EDIT: This is specifically in the context of the :s command. Posting Rules You may not post new threads. A protip by joe_james about vim, whitespace, and vi. For example, if tabstop=8 and softtabstop=3, then, in Insert Mode: Note that the user wants to also replace tabs ("all white-spaces"). Same results in a single call (directly add 4 spaces)::%s/notab/ <-here is a tab/ But it is not convenient, this first version include real tab in the text, which need to be re-tabed and the second version depends on the number of spaces defined to be one tab. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r While copying, the existing TAB characters have been replaces with spaces, due to the below lines in the . ; We‘ll cover how to use these options in more detail soon. emacs (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) VIm. A quick way to visualize whether there is a Tab character is by searching for it using Vim’s search-commands:. The advantage of this method is that you can also use it the other way around, to convert from 4 to 2 spaces for example. How to convert leading spaces to tabs? 1. filetype plugin indent on " On and indeed I did see some changes to my VIM when initially creating the . Postponed directory as a news article, and anything " at all with a . Source: Grepper. Thanks. pr -e4 means to expand hard tabs to spaces using tabstops 4 apart; the -t tells pr not to paginate the file (it's usually used to format Use \r instead of \n. Command to replace single space with tabs in a text file. in vim you can do this: # first in . vimを使用する際にタブ↔︎スペースの変換が一度にできるコマンドがあったのでメモタブ→スペース:set expandtab:retab 4(スペースの数)スペース→タブ: I would like to replace all spaces at the start of the line with tabs. Modified 11 years ago. The formatting will never be messed up when 'tabstop' is changed. How do I prevent vim from replacing spaces with tabs when autoindent is on? An example: if I have two tabs and 7 spaces in the beginning of the line, and tabstop=3, and I press Enter, the next lin Visualizing Tabs. Thank you for your answer! – Chris Snow. If there were a way to count how many matches were found, something like this could work :%s/^\( \)*/\count^I/g, but I don't know whether any of that exists Vim also provides ways to insert and convert tabs into spaces: expandtab – Insert spaces rather than tab characters when pressing tab. If you want to change tabs to spaces in a lot of files, but don't want to open them individually, I have found that it works equally as well to just use the Find and Replace option from the left-most tools bar. No ads, nonsense or The noexpandtab option prevents the conversion of tabs to spaces. I've tried using a custom function that somebody created: I've looked through various answers which imply that setting the following in . However, if the width of the block is not a multiple of a <Tab> width and the text after the inserted block contains <Tab>s, that text may be misaligned. The spaces separating the columns are tabs. Vim indenting and alignment: combining spaces and tabs. How can I auto indent large sections of code using spaces instead of tabs? There is already an accepted answer but it does hardcoded basic tab expansion, while tabs have a variable width suitable for alignment, which is not taken into account in the previous answer. Set 'tabstop' and 'shiftwidth' to whatever you prefer and use 'expandtab'. How to use tabs as horizontal indentation and spaces as vertical indentation in Vim? 3. Commented Jul 30, I use lazyvim to coding in 'C' but when i hit enter it add spaces instaed of Tabs i wanna tabs not spaces due to Betty style . 0 vi editor : How to replace multiple tab by tab-space-tab. This article has an excellent vimrc script for handling tabs+spaces, and converting in between them. vimrc would be appropriate to force tab insertions to become spaces. You may not post replies. Vim search and replace - how to replace all tabs with spaces Vim search and replace - how to replace all tabs with spaces - convert-tab-characters-to-spaces. There's also &softtabstop (&sts), pick which one you actually care about. If you want to modify your files so that a hard tab is replaced by the appropriate number of spaces, then you can filter them through pr. Then Vim will use a mix of tabs and spaces, but typing and will behave like a tab appears every 4 (or 3) characters. I tried shiftwidth=2, tabstop=2, but no matter what, it's still indents using tabs instead of spacebar, which causes the JADE compile to throw errors. Conversely, if you want to replace all spaces with tabs, you can use the following command: :%s/ /\t/g. Is it possible to replace these spaces with TAB character again? According to Search and replace I can just do :%s/spaces_for_tab/tab/g. py (with the original going to file. For those tasks you could use a plugin like Align. The command above allows me to replace n tabs at the beginning of each line with n four-spaces. VIM: Yank multiple non-continous chunks of text into a registers. The Vim wiki page on removing unwanted white space explains how to combine \s and \+ to look for many white space and tab characters. Improve this answer. Each group of four spaces should have a display width of 8, and I should not be allowed to move my cursor inside each group of four spaces, all insertions and deletions happen four spaces at once. You could also be interested by by :h 'tabstop' which defines the number of spaces that a tab character in the file counts for. with space in Vim. It comes preinstalled on macOS and most Linux distributions. To create a reverse J mapping for regular use, you can use the following::nnoremap <key> <Cmd>s/\s\+/\g/g<CR> Replace <key> with whatever key (sequence) you want for reverse J. And you want to remove spaces at start and end and replace in between multiple spaces with a comma ",". This article describes how to find and replace text in Vim / Vi. And actually, set expandtab does NOT means your files don't First set expandtab allows to replace the tabs by white spaces characters :h 'expandtab'. If you have the UNIX expand command, you can just use that. When 'expandtab' is set, indenting is always done using space characters only. Make a new file called . 5. I will spear everyone a rant on that subject. Share. Anyway I want to refactor only spaces at the beginning of line. Specifically, this vim “tabs to spaces” command is all you need: Indenting with spaces. vimrc set up :set expandtab :set tabstop = 4 # or you can do this :set tabstop = 4 shiftwidth = 4 expandtab # then in the py file in command mode, run :retab! or run this in command line Had a similar problem with replace consecutive spaces with a single tab. Instead of using the backspace key to clear out 4 spaces at a time, shift+tab would be a great keyboard shortcut to use (since the shift modifier typically reverses the behavior of another shortcut). 33. This way you will always insert spaces. e. Commented Mar 22, 2013 at 18:53. – Todd. Last Updated: February 25, 2016 · 1. Last updated: March 29, 2017. You can use ">><<" to replace an indent made out of spaces with the same indent made out of <Tab>s (and a few spaces if necessary). You So tabs are also taken care of, and multiple spaces will still result in only one line break. ; retab – Convert existing tabs to spaces based on tabstop and shiftwidth. However, since I use hard tabs in most places, vim will replace any spaces that are greater than or equal to the current shift width with hard tabs. Hot Network Questions Movie where they're searching for the base of monsters. Also consider formatting your answer using the tools provided. The regular expression that will match two or more spaces is ' *', so in vi, type:%s/ */XX/g To explain, thats: to enter ex command mode % apply this change to all lines s replace everything between the first and second slashes with everything between the second and third <sp><sp><sp>* two spaces, followed by zero or more spaces This appearance, with every other indent level dropped, is usually (and seems to be the case in your code) a symptom of looking at code which has 4 spaces per indent, but 8-space tabs tabs on every other line (e. For example, take the following comment (› = tab, = space): vi/vim editor FAQ: How do I convert tabs to spaces in vim?. I can't do :%s/ /^I/g bc this replaces within lines too. :set tabstop=2) value given, but all tabs In VI command mode when you are within the file, execute below regular expression to search for tabs and replace with single space. Press button, get tabs. I need vim to only replace instances of 4 spaces at the beginning of lines only. In vim for example, I can do %s/\t/ /gc. The above command will search entire file (%s) for the tab (\t) and replace with space Answer: This is actually easy to do with the vi or vim editor. Remove all white space in a file and replace them with a comma using Vim. Delete characters from the end of multiple lines in VIm. And if the file is readonly or nomodifiable it will probably throw a bunch of errors, also the use of gdefault has to be considered. I'll try to give some "vanilla VS Code" solutions. You should weigh the pros and cons carefully before making a decision. Finding and replacing text in Vim is quick and " Vi: " To replace tabs with spaces whilst typing set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab" Vi: vim replace tabs with spaces Comment . Just paste your text in the form below, press Convert Spaces button, and you get spaces replaced with tabs. Replacing all TABs with spaces in a file. This tip explains how :retab converts tabs to spaces, or spaces to tabs, and provides a "super retab" command to convert only the whitespace used for indentation in programs. #vi. How do I make vi-Vim never use tabs (converting spaces to tabs, bad!), makes the tab key == 4 spaces, and automatically indent code after curly brace blocks like Emacs does? You can replace all the tabs with spaces in the entire file with:%retab Share. 116k 15 15 IF your data includes an arbitrary sequence of blank characters (tab, space), and you want to replace each sequence with one comma, use the following: &quot; Vi: &quot; To replace tabs with spaces whilst typing set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab Level up your programming skills with exercises across 52 languages, and insightful discussion with our dedicated team of welcoming mentors. org root = true # General rules that apply to all files [*] indent_style = space indent_size = 4 end_of_line = lf trim_trailing_whitespace = true insert_final_newline = . Note that to look at the result of the substitution, you'll have to quote it as well, or it'll be shell This is a section of my . To move a line several 'shiftwidth's, use Visual mode or the : commands. txt extension as being human-language text [this clobbers the " `help' filetype, but that doesn't seem to prevent help from working " properly]: augroup This is a very dangerous command. . vimrc set up :set expandtab :set tabstop = 4 # or you can do this :set tabstop = 4 shiftwidth = 4 expandtab # then in the py file in command mode, run :retab! or run this in command line I have one file and would like to do search and replace – as shown My_name group_1 \ (TAB)(SPACE) (TAB)(SPACE) -class { student_1 } My_name group_2 \ (TAB)(SPACE You can get the value of an option in Vimscript by prepending &. answered Feb 16, 2020 at 9:47. My old setting was like this: syntax on filetype on set softtabstop=2 set shiftwidth=2 set tabstop=2 set expandtab set smartindent In vim's insert mode, one can use Ctrl-v <TAB> to insert a literal tab, even if you have set the tab key to insert spaces. You can set the 'expandtab' (abbreviated to 'et') option so each tab that you type is converted to an equivalent number of spaces. Share . Contributed on Oct This question has better answers for this in my opinion. Replace. Use the Convert Indentation to Tabs or Convert Indentation to Spaces command in I'd like to replace multiple spaces with a single space in vim. Traverse files and replace all tabs to two spaces. How to use only tab (not space) in vim. txt > output. This will replace each group of four spaces with a single tab character. I would not recommend this setting! Better would be to set your tabstop setting appropriately and have Vim display tabs as 4 spaces. After :SPUpdate, you can assign plugins need to be updated. txt $ cat --show-tabs output. All the above works for new files. :help expandtab An illustration. Though, of course, How can I convert leading spaces to tabs in Vim or Linux? 1. which gives me real tab, so in order to replace it by 4 space in need to call :retab. 5 How to convert leading spaces to tabs? 1 This will replace each tab character with four spaces. Space, and space characters in critical places, i. Other answers provided some workarounds, though. Searching for the Tab Character. Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to replace tabs with spaces is a personal one. 118. And also redirect the output and save to a new file keeping the original file as it is. This is opposed to the default, where vim prefers the World's simplest spaces to tabs converter for web developers and programmers. #vim. In vim, use same regex to replace: s/ /,/g Share. vi editor : How to replace multiple tab by tab-space-tab. Stack Overflow. To convert tabs to spaces in the currently opened file in Vim, enter the Normal mode by pressing Esc I'd like to replace all two-space indents with tabs. Example use to replace all spaces by one in a selection: :'<,'>s/\s\+/ /g. All of the previous solutions presented here require one of the following fairly brute-force solutions: a global RegEx replacement of space sequences, a copy-'n-paste of a hard-coded Tab character, or toggling from space- to tab-indentation and (hopefully remembering to change) back again once you're done. I doubt if this solve the problem or replacing space with a newline, The below vi command will substitute any number of leading tabs on each line with four spaces for each tab: Collaborating with other developers often means that not everyone is on the same pr -e4 means to expand hard tabs to spaces using tabstops 4 apart; the -t tells pr not to paginate the file (it's usually used to format a file for printing, hence its name). 0. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. Vim has been providing the 'listchars' option to show Tab vs. I currently do this with :set et | '<,'> retab! | set noet after selecting the block visually, so that '< and '> marks are set. Replace tabs with spaces in Vim. It is simple and it will work for many cases. – Update plugins. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things: \n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. They also have options to only convert initial, leading spaces/tabs. If you use \r or ^M in the replacement part of a substitution in vim, it inserts a newline. It will be presented two ways to visualize Tabs in Vim. We also provided tips for replacing tabs with spaces in Vim. 4s, 1t, 1t4s, 2t), with a tabstop setting of 4. Skip to content. 3 Vim replacing tabs with double spaces. In the first box (Find), copy and paste a tab from the source code. All gists Back to GitHub Sign in Sign up Sign in Sign up You signed in with another tab or window. Coderwall Ruby Python JavaScript Front-End Sign In or Up. You can either copy a TAB character in your file and use the "Search and replace" feature in your editor to replace them with spaces. Link to this answer Share Copy Link . Be sure to include this in your. In this example, we’re replacing each space with a TAB character. fjyv olibqr nyjec aqko ivk twru znwdbqhyz rpcjd stv rikkj onioseh bvyr ozms mzvng ethtpf