vim - cut / copy paste with indent intact nicely

System administration in Linux / BSD can never do without a text editor, and vim is definitely de-factor editor. vim is not only an text editor, it can be also a IDE (integrated development environment) and it is extremely light in resource. Just to mention a few of its features, syntax highlighting, auto indent, search & replace, copy/cut & paste & others. vim comes with all versions of linux & BSD, check your flavors documentation.

Problem :
copy / cut text from other apps (e.g. gedit, openoffice, kedit, abiword, textmate, notepad, textedit & other text editor) to vim often jumble up the space.


Solution :
before paste / inserting text into vim, run :

:set paste

(notice the colon) and it would reserved the indent


to resume the previous text behavior, run :

:set nopaste

Ciao !!!