When using Vim, how do you make it so that ALL your files you manipulate from now on will have 4-space tabs with vertical tab marks?
Vim can display meta-characters that indicate tabs, eol (end-of-line) characters and such. To enable this just put the following in your ~/.vimrc file:
set list
To set vim to use 4 spaces on tabs:
set tabstop=4
If you wish to have your tabs act as if you input four individual spaces, and a way to delete these as one tab, include:
set expandtab
set softtabstop=4
Or, if you're lazy like me, you simply copy the ~/.vimrc file from your remote location to your home directory (note that it may use options or resources not available on your version etc.)
scp [email protected]:~/.vimrc ~/