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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T01:19:52+00:00

I am making the effort to learn Vim. When I paste code into my

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I am making the effort to learn Vim.

When I paste code into my document from the clipboard, I get extra spaces at the start of each new line:

line
  line
    line

I know you can turn off auto indent but I can’t get it to work because I have some other settings conflicting or something (which look pretty obvious in my .vimrc but don’t seem to matter when I take them out).

How do I turn off auto indenting when I paste code but still have vim auto indent when I am writing code? Here is my .vimrc file:

set expandtab  
set tabstop=2  
set shiftwidth=2  
set autoindent  
set smartindent  
set bg=dark  
set nowrap
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Update: Better answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/38258720/62202

    To turn off autoindent when you paste code, there’s a special “paste” mode.

    Type 

    :set paste

    Then paste your code. Note that the text in the tooltip now says -- INSERT (paste) --.

    After you pasted your code, turn off the paste-mode, so that auto-indenting when you type works correctly again.

    :set nopaste

    However, I always found that cumbersome. That’s why I map <F3> such that it can switch between paste and nopaste modes while editing the text! I add this to .vimrc

    set pastetoggle=<F3>
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