It should be trivial, and it might even be in the help, but I can't figure out how to navigate it. How do I indent multiple lines quickly in vi?
30 Answers
Use the > command. To indent five lines, 5>>. To mark a block of lines and indent it, Vjj> to indent three lines (Vim only). To indent a curly-braces block, put your cursor on one of the curly braces and use >% or from anywhere inside block use >iB.
If you’re copying blocks of text around and need to align the indent of a block in its new location, use ]p instead of just p. This aligns the pasted block with the surrounding text.
Also, the shiftwidth
setting allows you to control how many spaces to indent.
This answer summarises the other answers and comments of this question, and it adds extra information based on the Vim documentation and the Vim wiki. For conciseness, this answer doesn't distinguish between Vi and Vim-specific commands.
In the commands below, "re-indent" means "indent lines according to your indentation settings." shiftwidth
is the primary variable that controls indentation.
General Commands
>> Indent line by shiftwidth spaces
<< De-indent line by shiftwidth spaces
5>> Indent 5 lines
5== Re-indent 5 lines
>% Increase indent of a braced or bracketed block (place cursor on brace first)
=% Reindent a braced or bracketed block (cursor on brace)
<% Decrease indent of a braced or bracketed block (cursor on brace)
]p Paste text, aligning indentation with surroundings
=i{ Re-indent the 'inner block', i.e. the contents of the block
=a{ Re-indent 'a block', i.e. block and containing braces
=2a{ Re-indent '2 blocks', i.e. this block and containing block
>i{ Increase inner block indent
<i{ Decrease inner block indent
You can replace {
with }
or B
, e.g. =iB
is a valid block indent command. Take a look at "Indent a Code Block" for a nice example to try these commands out on.
Also, remember that
. Repeat last command
, so indentation commands can be easily and conveniently repeated.
Re-indenting complete files
Another common situation is requiring indentation to be fixed throughout a source file:
gg=G Re-indent entire buffer
You can extend this idea to multiple files:
" Re-indent all your C source code:
:args *.c
:argdo normal gg=G
:wall
Or multiple buffers:
" Re-indent all open buffers:
:bufdo normal gg=G:wall
In Visual Mode
Vjj> Visually mark and then indent three lines
In insert mode
These commands apply to the current line:
CTRL-t insert indent at start of line
CTRL-d remove indent at start of line
0 CTRL-d remove all indentation from line
Ex commands
These are useful when you want to indent a specific range of lines, without moving your cursor.
:< and :> Given a range, apply indentation e.g.
:4,8> indent lines 4 to 8, inclusive
Indenting using markers
Another approach is via markers:
ma Mark top of block to indent as marker 'a'
...move cursor to end location
>'a Indent from marker 'a' to current location
Variables that govern indentation
You can set these in your .vimrc file.
set expandtab "Use softtabstop spaces instead of tab characters for indentation
set shiftwidth=4 "Indent by 4 spaces when using >>, <<, == etc.
set softtabstop=4 "Indent by 4 spaces when pressing <TAB>
set autoindent "Keep indentation from previous line
set smartindent "Automatically inserts indentation in some cases
set cindent "Like smartindent, but stricter and more customisable
Vim has intelligent indentation based on filetype. Try adding this to your .vimrc:
if has ("autocmd")
" File type detection. Indent based on filetype. Recommended.
filetype plugin indent on
endif
References
The master of all commands is
gg=G
This indents the entire file!
And below are some of the simple and elegant commands used to indent lines quickly in Vim or gVim.
To indent the current line
==
To indent the all the lines below the current line
=G
To indent n
lines below the current line
n==
For example, to indent 4 lines below the current line
4==
To indent a block of code, go to one of the braces and use command
=%
These are the simplest, yet powerful commands to indent multiple lines.
In addition to the answer already given and accepted, it is also possible to place a marker and then indent everything from the current cursor to the marker.
Thus, enter ma
where you want the top of your indented block, cursor down as far as you need and then type >'a
(note that "a
" can be substituted for any valid marker name). This is sometimes easier than 5>>
or vjjj>
.
Suppose you use 2 spaces to indent your code. Type:
:set shiftwidth=2
- Type v (to enter visual block editing mode)
- Move the cursor with the arrow keys (or with h/j/k/l) to highlight the lines you want to indent or unindent.
Then:
- Type > to indent once (2 spaces).
- Type 2> to indent twice (4 spaces).
- Type 3> to indent thrice (6 spaces).
- ...
- Type < to unindent once (2 spaces).
- Type 2< to unindent twice (4 spaces).
- Type 3< to unindent thrice (6 spaces).
- ...
You get the idea.
(Empty lines will not get indented, which I think is kind of nice.)
I found the answer in the (g)vim documentation for indenting blocks:
:help visual-block
/indent
If you want to give a count to the command, do this just before typing the operator character: "v{move-around}3>" (move lines 3 indents to the right).
The beauty of Vim's UI is that its consistency. Editing commands are made up of the command and a cursor move. The cursor moves are always the same:
- H to top of screen, L to bottom, M to middle
- nG to go to line n, G alone to bottom of file, gg to top
- n to move to next search match, N to previous
- } to end of paragraph
- % to next matching bracket, either of the parentheses or the tag kind
- enter to the next line
- 'x to mark x where x is a letter or another
'
. - many more, including w and W for word, $ or 0 to tips of the line, etc., that don't apply here because are not line movements.
So, in order to use vim you have to learn to move the cursor and remember a repertoire of commands like, for example, > to indent (and < to "outdent").
Thus, for indenting the lines from the cursor position to the top of the screen you do >H, >G to indent to the bottom of the file.
If, instead of typing >H, you type dH then you are deleting the same block of lines, cH for replacing it, etc.
Some cursor movements fit better with specific commands. In particular, the % command is handy to indent a whole HTML or XML block. If the file has syntax highlighted (:syn on
) then setting the cursor in the text of a tag (like, in the "i" of <div> and entering >% will indent up to the closing </div> tag.
This is how Vim works: one has to remember only the cursor movements and the commands, and how to mix them. So my answer to this question would be "go to one end of the block of lines you want to indent, and then type the > command and a movement to the other end of the block" if indent is interpreted as shifting the lines, = if indent is interpreted as in pretty-printing.
You can use the norm i
command to insert given text at the beginning of the line. To insert 10 spaces before lines 2-10:
:2,10norm 10i
Remember that there has to be a space character at the end of the command - this will be the character we want to have inserted. We can also indent a line with any other text, for example to indent every line in a file with five underscore characters:
:%norm 5i_
Or something even more fancy:
:%norm 2i[ ]
More practical example is commenting Bash/Python/etc code with # character:
:1,20norm i#
To re-indent use x instead of i. For example, to remove first 5 characters from every line:
:%norm 5x
A quick way to do this using VISUAL MODE
uses the same process as commenting a block of code.
This is useful if you would prefer not to change your shiftwidth
or use any set
directives and is flexible enough to work with TABS or SPACES or any other character.
- Position cursor at the beginning on the block
- v to switch to
-- VISUAL MODE --
- Select the text to be indented
- Type
:
to switch to the prompt Replacing with 3 leading spaces:
:'<,'>s/^/ /g
Or replacing with leading tabs:
:'<,'>s/^/\t/g
Brief Explanation:
'<,'>
- Within the Visually Selected Ranges/^/ /g
- Insert 3 spaces at the beginning of every line within the whole range(or)
s/^/\t/g
- InsertTab
at the beginning of every line within the whole range
I like to mark text for indentation:
- go to beginning of line of text then type ma (a is the label from the 'm'ark: it could be any letter)
- go to end line of text and type mz (again, z could be any letter)
- :'a,'z> or :'a,'z< will indent or outdent (is this a word?)
- Voila! The text is moved (empty lines remain empty with no spaces)
PS: you can use the :'a,'z technique to mark a range for any operation (d, y, s///, etc.) where you might use lines, numbers, or %.
For me, the MacVim (Visual) solution was, select with mouse and press ">", but after putting the following lines in "~/.vimrc" since I like spaces instead of tabs:
set expandtab
set tabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2
Also it's useful to be able to call MacVim from the command-line (Terminal.app), so since I have the following helper directory "~/bin", where I place a script called "macvim":
#!/usr/bin/env bash
/usr/bin/open -a /Applications/MacPorts/MacVim.app $@
And of course in "~/.bashrc":
export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin
MacPorts messes with "~/.profile" a lot, so the PATH environment variable can get quite long.
:help left
In ex mode
you can use :left
or :le
to align lines a specified amount.
Specifically, :left
will Left align lines in the [range]. It sets the indent in the lines to [indent] (default 0).
:%le3
or :%le 3
or :%left3
or :%left 3
will align the entire file by padding with three spaces.
:5,7 le 3
will align lines 5 through 7 by padding them with three spaces.
:le
without any value or :le 0
will left align with a padding of 0.
This works in Vim and gVim.
I didn't find a method I use in the comments, so I'll share it (I think Vim only):
- Esc to enter command mode
- Move to the first character of the last line you want to indent
- Ctrl + V to start block select
- Move to the first character of the first line you want to indent
- Shift + I to enter special insert mode
- Type as many space/tabs as you need to indent to (two for example
- Press Esc and spaces will appear in all lines
This is useful when you don't want to change indentation/tab settings in vimrc
or to remember them to change it while editing.
To unindent I use the same Ctrl + V block select to select spaces and delete it with D.
I don’t know why it's so difficult to find a simple answer like this one...
I myself had to struggle a lot to know this. It's very simple:
- Edit your
.vimrc
file under the home directory. Add this line
set cindent
in your file where you want to indent properly.
In normal/command mode type
10== (This will indent 10 lines from the current cursor location) gg=G (Complete file will be properly indented)
Using Python a lot, I find myself needing frequently needing to shift blocks by more than one indent. You can do this by using any of the block selection methods, and then just enter the number of indents you wish to jump right before the >
For example, V5j3>
will indent five lines three times - which is 12 spaces if you use four spaces for indents.
I use block-mode visual selection:
- Go to the front of the block to move (at the top or bottom).
- Press Ctrl + V to enter visual block mode.
- Navigate to select a column in front of the lines.
- Press
I
(Shift + I) to enter insert mode. - Type some spaces.
- Press Esc. All lines will shift.
This is not a uni-tasker. It works:
- In the middle of lines.
- To insert any string on all lines.
- To change a column (use
c
instead ofI
). - yank, delete, substitute, etc...
How to indent highlighted code in vi immediately by a number of spaces:
Option 1: Indent a block of code in vi to three spaces with Visual Block mode:
Select the block of code you want to indent. Do this using Ctrl+V in normal mode and arrowing down to select text. While it is selected, enter
:
to give a command to the block of selected text.The following will appear in the command line:
:'<,'>
To set indent to three spaces, type
le 3
and press enter. This is what appears::'<,'>le 3
The selected text is immediately indented to three spaces.
Option 2: Indent a block of code in vi to three spaces with Visual Line mode:
- Open your file in vi.
- Put your cursor over some code
Be in normal mode and press the following keys:
Vjjjj:le 3
Interpretation of what you did:
V
means start selecting text.jjjj
arrows down four lines, highlighting four lines.:
tells vi you will enter an instruction for the highlighted text.le 3
means indent highlighted text three lines.The selected code is immediately increased or decreased to three spaces indentation.
Option 3: use Visual Block mode and special insert mode to increase indent:
- Open your file in vi.
- Put your cursor over some code
Be in normal mode press the following keys:
Ctrl+V
jjjj
(press the spacebar five times)
Esc Shift+i
All the highlighted text is indented an additional five spaces.
- Press "SHIFT + v" to enter VISUAL LINE mode.
- Select the text you wish to indent but using either the cursor keys or the "j" and "k" keys.
- To indent right press "SHIFT + dot" (> character). To indent left press "SHIFT + comma" (< character).
Source: https://www.fir3net.com/UNIX/General/how-do-i-tab-multiple-lines-within-vi.html