Makefile tabs when I have spaces in .vimrc

user_9358191 0
Viewed 1824

So in my .vimrc file, I have my tabs set to 2 spaces. I know that the Makefile doesn't like this and what I have been doing is temporarily deleting the .vimrc conditions I have and editing the Makefile and then adding everything back to the .vimrc file. Is there any way I can use vim on the Makefile edit it without having to do all the changes? My Makefiles are very simple. Like here below

all: main.cpp
  g++ -g -Wall main.cpp

Here is my .vimrc

set number
colorscheme ron 
set expandtab
: filetype on
: syntax on
: filetype indent on
set tabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2
unix makefile vim linux
3 Answers

You're missing out on Vim's :help filetype-plugin functionality. If you put

:filetype plugin on

(you can combine all filetype commands from your ~/.vimrc as one :filetype indent plugin on), and assuming your Makefile has a regular name so that it is detected (or you manually :setfiletype make), this will load buffer-local settings from $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugin/make.vim, which contains these indent settings:

" Make sure a hard tab is used, required for most make programs
setlocal noexpandtab softtabstop=0

If you explicitly don't want the filetype plugin feature (but be aware that any built-in option can be tweaked via user-configuration (:help after-directory), and the defaults are useful in general), you could emulate this setting via :autocmd in your ~/.vimrc, too:

autocmd FileType make setlocal noexpandtab softtabstop=0
user_8136020

I think that setting your editor properly is the correct answer. However I'll just point out that if you use GNU make 3.82 or higher you could change the recipe introduction character from a TAB to something else using .RECIPEPREFIX as in:

.RECIPEPREFIX = |

all: main.cpp
| g++ -g -Wall main.cpp

As per the docs the prefix must be a single character, it cannot be a string.

user_9395570

You could add a vim modeline to your Makefile, either as first or last line, to set the noexpandtab option on a per-file basis:

# vim: set noexpandtab:
user_17737980
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