[comp.lang.fortran] Tabs, vi

seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel) (06/14/89)

In article <BILL.89Jun12125206@hcx2.ssd.harris.com> bill@ssd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) wrote:

>number of space characters.  One of the many reasons I hate the 'vi' editor
>is its insistence on inserting tabs, even when I didn't hit the tab key!!!!

And In article <109818@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> khb@sun.UUCP (Keith Bierman - SPD Languages Marketing -- MTS) wrote:

>There does seem to be little merit in having the <tab> symbol embeded
>in source code... yet another reason to not use vi.

You guys must have vi's autoindent option turned on.  Sometimes people
think that the 'set ai' in their .exrc or EXINIT has something to do
with Artificial Intelligence... it means autoindent, a feature I find
most annoying.   Around here the system default is noautoindent, but
your site might be different.   For fortran programming with vi, the
EXINIT environment variable could be 'set ignorecase noautoindent'.
Alternatively you can have that in the file ~/.exrc   The only other
way that I've seen vi insert tabs is if you use '>>' in command mode.
This does seem to mean "insert a tab", so just don't do it.  Tabs have
lots of advantages, eg try scrolling a heavilly indented piece of code
at 1200 baud - tabs really help;  but I've seen more than one user
completely baffled by these invisible impediments to f77 portability.

George Seibel, UCSF