UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

We have a guy at work who is trying to copy and paste from one file to another using vi and highlighting the code to copy with a mouse.

Source file:

xyz 123 abc 999
zyx 321 cba 999
xyz 123 abc 999


But when he pastes it he gets (I put the underlines in to show the layout they are just spaces on his screen):

__xyz 123 abc 999
____zyx 321 cba 999
______xyz 123 abc 999


So it looks to me like his tabs are setup wrongly. I tried the same operation using my user and it works fine for me and keeps it's oringinal alignment.

Any thoughts on what is wrong (and more importantly how to fix it! )?

Please use :set paste before pasting in .

After that you may do :set nopaste to continue.

You can also try to have in your .exec or .vimrc "set noautoindent" for a permanent behaviour.

if you don't want any kind of indenting, and your user only uses Vim for data, he might prefer to use nano or pico.

I suffered the above problem for a long time, I am a coder so i need my indenting. I would open "nano" , paste a code sample in, then open the file in Vim. Recently, i found the tip above in vim.org (set paste).

Hi all, unfortunately :set paste didn't work so I guess it's a different version of vi being used.

I did find the answer in the end though, he had autoindent turned on. He did :set noautoindent and that sorted out the problem.

Thanks anyway.