A related question: Tabbing visual selection in VIM
I want to put tabs to the beginning of a text on VIM. More specifically, what I want to do is the following,
Before:
Lorem ipsum ipsum ipsum
Lorem lorem lorem lorem
Lorem ipsum ipsum ipsum
After:
^ILorem ipsum ipsum ipsum
^ILorem lorem lorem lorem
^ILorem ipsum ipsum ipsum
Note that ^I
is the tab character. So, I don't want VIM to use whitespaces to indent my code. What I am doing for now to pursue this is the following,
1. Visually select lines using: <SHIFT + v> jjj
2. Indent lines using: >
However, this results me the following,
^I^I Lorem ipsum ipsum ipsum
^I^I Lorem lorem lorem lorem
^I^I Lorem ipsum ipsum ipsum
Note that there are two tabs in the beginning of the line and two whitespaces, then Lorem ipsum..
text is starting..
Why do I have '^I^I '
in the beginning of the line and do not have only '^I'
?