Indenting in VIM with all the files in Folder

Much simpler than scripting vim from the bash command line is to use vimscript from inside of vim (or perhaps a much simpler one-liner for scripting vim from the command line). I personally prefer using the arg list for all multi-file manipulation. For example:

:args ~/src/myproject/**/*.ttl | argdo execute "normal gg=G" | update

• args sets the arglist, using wildcards (** will match the current directory as well as subdirectories)
• | lets us run multiple commands on one line
• argdo runs the following commands on each arg (it will swallow up the second |)
• execute prevents normal from swallowing up the next pipe.
• normal runs the following normal mode commands (what you were working with in the first place)
• update is like :w, but only saves when the buffer is modified.

This :args ... | argdo ... | update pattern is very useful for any sort of project wide file manipulation (e.g. search and replace via %s/foo/bar/ge or setting uniform fileformat or fileencoding).

(other people prefer a similar pattern using the buffer list and :bufdo, but with the arg list I don't need to worry about closing current buffers or opening up new vim session.)

Open up a terminal. Type:

$ vim -w indentme.scr foo.c

Then, type this exactly (in command mode):

gg=G:wq

This will close vim, saving the process of indenting all lines in the file to a Vim script called indentme.scr.

Note: indentme.scr will contain a record of all key commands typed, so when you are done indenting the file, don't spend a lot of time using the arrow keys to look around the file, because this will lead to a much larger script and will severely slow down batch operations.

Now, in order to indent all the lines in a file, just type the following command:

$ vim -s indentme.scr unindented-file.c

Vim will flash open-shut (if you're on a fast computer and not editing a huge file), indenting all lines, then saving the file in-place.

Unfortunately, this will only work on one file at a time, but you can scale the functionality easily using sh's for loop:

for filename in *.ttl ; do
    vim -s indentme.scr "$filename"
done

Note: This will save-over any file. Unless set bk is in your ~/.vimrc, don't expect a backup to be saved.

I went off of amphetamachine's solution. However, I needed to recursively search through multiple directories. Here's the solution that I used:

$ find . -type f -name '*.ttl' -exec vim -s indentme.scr "{}" \;