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.