Tabs in VI

[Bill.Stewart.[ho95c]]

In article <4885 at teddy.UUCP> jpn at teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson) writes:
} > Bill Stewart writes:
} >>	:set tabstop=0
} >>will let you do autoindent without tabs.  Already tabbed text seems to
} At least with BSD versions of "vi", a :set tabstop=0 is IDENTICAL to
} :set tabstop=8.  After setting the tabstop to zero, tabs are 8 long,

Arrgh, sure enough!  I use vi version 3.9 (found in SVR2 and following),
but I scrounged up a 3.7 version (4.*BSD, V8, V9, SVR0, etc.) and it
did what John claimed.  As long as you detab the document first, you
can use :set tabstop=99 to make tabstops big enough vi doesn't use them
(assuming you don't want to use the TAB key to indent with.)  Or you
can pipe your file through col -x to zap tabs afterwards.
-- 
#				Thanks;
#Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs