vi tabs

[sde at mitre-bedford.ARPA]

Thank you for the pointing out the expand filter.  I looked up tab[s],
etc. but didn't think of that keyword.

  |>A vi question (they don't give out complete manuals here, it seems):
  |  Give me a break.  We hand out everything that comes from Bezerkley.
  |Did you know enough to ask the librarian for the ex documentation too?

I had asked for all documentation on vi and had received:
	Edit: A Tutorial   (21 pages)
	Ex: Reference Manual (19+3 pages)
	An Introduction to Display Editing with Vi (30 pages),
and was told that that was all that was HERE.
Since it seemed reasonable that something like a Vi reference manual exist
somewhere, my parenthetical comment was a statement of observation (and
perhaps should have included "absit invidia"), along the lines of RAH's
"fair witness" idea.  It may be that I should have said that no complete
manuals are available, but I cannot bear witness to that statement, only to
the weaker remark that I made.

By the way, I have used editors that allowed one to specify that tabs were
immediately converted to spaces on input, though I am perfectly willing to
kludge things with expand, if that's the only way to do it.

  |>How can one get vi to cease putting actual tab chars into files?
  |  If you type tab characters into a file, vi will put them there.  

And as you noted, if one makes use of autoindentation, one is effectively
typing tab chars.

	Absit Invidia,
	David   sde at mitre-bedford