Function editing with Vim throws IndentError

[Matimus]

On Jul 24, 9:32 pm, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l... at geek-
central.gen.new_zealand> wrote:
> In message
> <e23f51c1-7160-4aba-bea0-d624ec9a1... at w1g2000prk.googlegroups.com>, Matimus
> wrote:
>
> > On Jul 24, 2:54 am, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <l... at geek-
> > central.gen.new_zealand> wrote:
> >> In message
> >> <f558e635-aa40-4d54-bd1a-45e8463cd... at v26g2000prm.googlegroups.com>,
>
> >> Matimus wrote:
> >> > That isn't the standard. With that setup tabs will show up as 4
> >> > spaces, and still confuse you.
>
> >> Why should that be confusing? The most common tab-stop setting is 4
> >> columns.
>
> > A tab character is specified as 8 spaces.
>
> Specified by whom? The most common setting these days is 4 columns.

All argument about specification aside, Python interprets a tab
character as equivalent to 8 spaces. If you are treating tabs as
equivalent to 4 spaces in your python code it will cause
IndentationError exceptions to be raised.

If you set 'tabstop' to 4 in Vim all of the blocks of code indented
using 4 spaces will be aligned with code indented with tabs. That is
obviously problematic. Setting 'et' will fix the problem of inserting
tabs, but does nothing to adjust the way tabs are displayed.

Vim has a feature 'softtabspace'/'sts' which is used to modify the way
tabs are inserted without modifying the way they are displayed. If you
are writing python code using Vim and you intend to indent using 4
spaces (as recommended by pep8), the best practice I have found is to
`set sw=4 ts=8 sts=4 et`.

Matt