How do I make Vim adapt to the current indenting style of the file I'm editing?

Question

I work on a range of JavaScript projects. In most of these projects, the indentation of JavaScript files is 2 spaces, so I've set my default indentation width to that. However it becomes 1 or 4 in some other projects.

Is there a way to ask Vim to change the indentation style based on the style already used in the current file?

Why dont you add such settings in .vimrc for particular filetype? :au BufEnter *.js :set shiftwidth=2. This works for all projects, — SibiCoder, May 28 '16 at 08:38
@SibiCoder: Because even the same filetype can have different indenting styles across different projects. (eg: projects not belonging to the same company) — thameera, May 29 '16 at 08:51
*.* is just a pattern. You can use filename or path as well. Or, you can use similar auto command like what I gave, for each file. You can instruct the auto command to take the tabwidth of current file and put it for path of this file. Its pretty easy. — SibiCoder, May 29 '16 at 09:10
Crosslink: same question on different sites indentation - How do I make Vim adapt to the current indenting style of the file I'm editing? - Vi and Vim Stack Exchange ■ whitespace - In Vim, how can I automatically determine whether to use spaces or tabs for indentation? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange ■ editor - Can vim recognize indentation styles (tabs vs. spaces) automatically? - Stack Overflow — user202729, Jun 03 '22 at 03:05

score 48 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 21 '23 at 20:54

48

Install this plugin: tpope/vim-sleuth

edited Feb 21 '23 at 20:54

answered Feb 03 '15 at 17:44

Dhruva Sagar

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Sleuth seems to work a bit better than detectindent, in my experience, and also will try to determine the proper indent settings for new files by looking at other files nearby in the filesystem. – jamessan Feb 03 '15 at 17:45
@jamessan didn't know that, good to know. – Dhruva Sagar Feb 03 '15 at 17:47
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Please read our policy on plugin-recommendation answers and add some detail about how exactly to use your recommended plugin to solve the problem. – 200_success Feb 06 '15 at 22:17

score 18 · Answer 2 · 2023-02-22T09:55:18.137

ciaranm/detectindent might be what you're looking for. It's unmaintained (last updated in 2015, there was also a fork that was last updated in 2016: roryokane/detectindent) and I haven't used it, but looks like it does what you want:

A Vim plugin, for automatically detecting indent settings. This plugin adds a :DetectIndent command, which tries to intelligently set the 'shiftwidth', 'expandtab' and 'tabstop' options based upon the existing settings in use in the active file.

How do I make Vim adapt to the current indenting style of the file I'm editing?

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