Question

For some reason, Vim keeps using soft-tabs (tabs as spaces) everytime I’m working on Haml files. I prefer regular tabs and have the following in my vimrc:

set autoindent
set noexpandtab
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4

Which seems to work great for every file type except for Haml. When editing Haml files Vim uses two spaces rather than a tab, any suggestions as to how this can be reverted back to my default settings (ie. regular tabs)?

Answer 1

It was because the indent script for haml sets expandtab for you automatically when VIM has detected the current file is in haml format. The script is located at $VIMRUNTIME/indent/haml.vim. It contains:

setlocal autoindent sw=2 et

To disable that, you can put this line in your ~/.vimrc to clear the expandtab setting again:

au! FileType haml set noet