Automatic Indenting

vi provides an autoindent option by setting:

:set ai<ret>	set autoindent on
:set noai<ret>	set autoindent off

vi default option is noautoindent, a user configuration file .exrc in user home ¹ or working directory may contain the set command (described in Section 33) to force automatic indenting. The current indent can be changed during insert mode, as follows.

spaces tabs	increase indent to right on new line
<ctrl>D	decrease indent to left on new line by shiftwidth
	or to column 1 whichever occurs first
^ followed by <ctrl>D	type a single line at column 1 without changing
	current indent value

If, for some need, it is necessary to transform <tab>s to true whitespaces, use the expand program to do the job (refer to expand(1) for more information). exapand syntax at shell level is:

expand old_file > new_file

expand may be called from vi on a paragraph or any valid vi text fragment with the following syntax:

!}expand

N.B. expand is not a vi command.