Question

I’m using the following .vimrc. Which contains (but not limited to) the following:

set encoding=utf-8
set tabstop=4
set autoindent
set list lcs=tab:·\ ,trail:•,eol:¬

This should give me four-space hard tabs, with the first character being displayed as a small mid-line dot, and the remaining three characters as spaces. But what I get is two-space hard tabs. Something else in my vimrc is throwing off the tab spacing.

Clearly I’m doing something wrong, and giving myself two-space hard tabs. I’ve researched listchars, vim compile flags and trying to input non-breaking space into my vimrc. Any other ideas what I’m doing wrong??

Answer 1

Just looked at your _vimrc; the confusion is in the following lines

augroup htmldjango
   set tabstop=2
   set softtabstop=2
   set shiftwidth=2
augroup END

You’re using set command and rewriting your previous tabstop, softtabstop and shiftwidth settings regardless of filetype. Therefore, you’re effectively setting your tab to 2.

It would be better maybe (and my guess is this is what you were trying to do) were you to use

augroup htmldjango
   autocmd!
   autocmd FileType html setlocal tabstop=2
   autocmd FileType html setlocal softtabstop=2
   autocmd FileType html setlocal shiftwidth=2
augroup END

therefore setting different tabstop, softtabstop, etc. only when HTML filetype is used.

Notice: I have no idea what is a htmldjango filetype so you might want to modify that part for what suits you best.