The MediaWiki developers use tabs instead of spaces for indentation. This can be annoying for someone like me who has configured VIM to work with spaces by default—annoying because I don’t want to enter something like :set tabstop=4 noexpandtab shiftwidth=4
every time that I open a file. Adding different conditions for each project to my .vimrc is probably possible but not much fun.
The other minute, when I opened the sources of my Semantic Gallery extension for MediaWiki, I noticed that I had been mixing tabs and spaces again. So it was time to look up the VIM feature which allows you to put a configuration line in a comment at the bottom of a file.
This quote is another perfect example of why it’s good practice to blog about such things. I remembered that the last time that I had wanted to do this, I could not find a useful search string at all and resorted to finding back an example in the code where I had first seen it and modifying that. Now, I thought I’d have to do the same, but from a quick googling I learned that I’m not the only one to use his blog as a memory extension. 🙂
Good. Hopefully, from now on, I’ll remember that this configuration-thingy-at-the-bottom-of-a-file
is called a modeline, so that I can just enter :help modeline
in VIM the next time that I forget where the colons have to go.
An example for when I do forget:
# vim:set ts=4 sw=4 noexpandtab:
This reminds me of my many searches for Heredoc syntax when I didn’t know that they were called Heredocs.
Thanks for writing down in words what a modeline was. Useful when you don’t know 😉
Heh, I just spent 10 minutes trying to remember what modelines are called *again* 🙂
Thanks for the post.
Haha 😀 Glad I could help! Apparently, I made up some good strings to be indexed by. 😉
Thanks. I couldn’t remember what it was called either.
I searched for “vim per file config” with google and this page came up
as the first one in list.
Yep, I just searched for “vim per-file configuration” and your page came up third on the results.