Indent multiple lines quickly in vi

vim editor indentation vi
Allain Lalonde picture Allain Lalonde · Oct 25, 2008 · Viewed 814k times · Source

It should be trivial, and it might even be in the help, but I can't figure out how to navigate it. How do I indent multiple lines quickly in vi?

Answer

Greg Hewgill picture Greg Hewgill · Oct 25, 2008

Use the > command. To indent five lines, 5>>. To mark a block of lines and indent it, Vjj> to indent three lines (Vim only). To indent a curly-braces block, put your cursor on one of the curly braces and use >% or from anywhere inside block use >iB.

If you’re copying blocks of text around and need to align the indent of a block in its new location, use ]p instead of just p. This aligns the pasted block with the surrounding text.

Also, the shiftwidth setting allows you to control how many spaces to indent.

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