Question

I have a code buffer in vim with lines that are prefixed with spaces (already did :set expandtab and :retab). Now I select some or all of the lines and copy them to the Windows clipboard. When I subsequently paste into another app, the spaces at the beginnings of all the lines have been replaced with tabs.

I can reproduce this pasting into several other applications, so I’m pretty sure it’s vim doing the replacing. Is there any way to disable this?

Answer 1

I just tried what you described, and I got spaces in the other applications — not tabs. expandtab should be enough, but here’s my (somewhat, but not all completely,) relevant vrmc settings. Maybe one will work for you:

set nocompatible
behave mswin
set shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4
set cindent
set smartindent
set autoindent
set expandtab