Question

Could someone explain to me in simple terms the easiest way to change the indentation behavior of Vim based on the file type? For instance, if I open a Python file it should indent with 2 spaces, but if I open a Powershell script it should use 4 spaces.

Answer 1

You can add .vim files to be executed whenever vim switches to a particular filetype.

For example, I have a file ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/html.vim with this contents:

setlocal shiftwidth=2 setlocal tabstop=2 

Which causes vim to use tabs with a width of 2 characters for indenting (the noexpandtab option is set globally elsewhere in my configuration).

This is described here: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_05.html#05.4, scroll down to the section on filetype plugins.