How do I make vim's autoindent not drop trailing spaces?

Question

In some text editors (e.g. Kate, gedit), when auto indent is enabled, pressing return twice will leave a trailing whitespace (which I want):

if (code) {
....
....|
}

While others cater to the coding standard where trailing spaces (even in blank lines) aren't allowed:

if (code) {

....|
}

What annoys me about this is that if I arrow up after auto-indenting, the auto-indent is lost:

if (code) {
|
....
}

If I run vim and :set autoindent , I get the latter behavior.

My question is, how do I set vim to keep the trailing spaces rather than automatically removing them if they go unused?

My initial reaction is that you're doing it wrong. By leaving blank lines indented like that you kill the possibility to use `{` or `}` (e.g. `d{` etc). — hlovdal, Oct 24 '11 at 07:16

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 17 '10 at 04:04

See this hint on the vim wiki for how to have correct indention even for empty lines. If you just want to keep the previous indent (ignoring what vim calculated as the correct indent) use let ind = indent(prevnonblank(v:lnum - 1)) like explained in a comment under the same wiki entry.

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

1

I found this solution to work for me:

:inoremap <Return> <Space><BS><Return>

edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

Community

1

answered Oct 24 '11 at 07:00

Xiong Chiamiov

966
8
11

1

This looks like a hack/workaround. Isn't there a proper option to turn off that "unindent blank line" behaviour? – Doub Oct 30 '12 at 11:26
Not that I know of - otherwise I would've posted it here. – Xiong Chiamiov Nov 15 '12 at 00:19

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 18 '15 at 17:46

0

In my .vimrc:

" Change a blank line upon creation so that its leading spaces won't be removed
inoremap <Return> <Return><Space><BS>
nnoremap o o<Space><BS>
nnoremap O O<Space><BS>

answered Nov 18 '15 at 17:46

Tom Hale

2,274
2
24
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How do I make vim's autoindent not drop trailing spaces?

3 Answers3