Easy way to set indentation on whole file

Question

I screwed up the formatting on a few files using VIM. What I thought was tabs was something that looked like tabs. Is there an easy to change the formatting back to standard tabs?

I can find a lot of info on doing from tabs to spaces, but not the other way around.

Did you find this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9104706/how-can-i-convert-spaces-to-tabs-in-vim-or-linux — xnx, Dec 10 '14 at 16:08
Are you aware that [PEP 8](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces) recommends spaces as the preferred indentation method? — Júda Ronén, Dec 10 '14 at 16:13
Yes, so that's what I've always used. But working on another existing project that does not. — dan-klasson, Dec 10 '14 at 16:14

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 10 '14 at 16:22

You can do this by disabling expanding tabs to spaces, and than replacing every sequence of whitespace with tabs:

:set expandtab 
:%retab!

Note: Retab command takes range, so you can execute it on the part of the file. Also, before executing this command, set proper size of tab, depending on your preferences, for example:

:set tabstop=2

This means that every two spaces will be replaced by tab.

Easy way to set indentation on whole file

1 Answers1