Ok i got it working with the scripts linked in the original question.
It turned out that i used supersnipmate, a snipmate fork, that unfortunately removed the builtin supertab support of snipmate.
Also i did use the original supertab hosted on vim.org that did not work with snipmate as well. The linked script on github turned out to be the successor (or continued version) of the old supertab.
This is a section of my .vimrc:
" enable filetype detection:
filetype on
filetype plugin on
filetype indent on " file type based indentation
" recognize anything in my .Postponed directory as a news article, and anything
" at all with a .txt extension as being human-language text [this clobbers the
" `help' filetype, but that doesn't seem to prevent help from working
" properly]:
augroup filetype
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead */.Postponed/* set filetype=mail
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.txt set filetype=human
augroup END
autocmd FileType mail set formatoptions+=t textwidth=72 " enable wrapping in mail
autocmd FileType human set formatoptions-=t textwidth=0 " disable wrapping in txt
" for C-like programming where comments have explicit end
" characters, if starting a new line in the middle of a comment automatically
" insert the comment leader characters:
autocmd FileType c,cpp,java set formatoptions+=ro
autocmd FileType c set omnifunc=ccomplete#Complete
" fixed indentation should be OK for XML and CSS. People have fast internet
" anyway. Indentation set to 2.
autocmd FileType html,xhtml,css,xml,xslt set shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2
" two space indentation for some files
autocmd FileType vim,lua,nginx set shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2
" for CSS, also have things in braces indented:
autocmd FileType css set omnifunc=csscomplete#CompleteCSS
" add completion for xHTML
autocmd FileType xhtml,html set omnifunc=htmlcomplete#CompleteTags
" add completion for XML
autocmd FileType xml set omnifunc=xmlcomplete#CompleteTags
" in makefiles, don't expand tabs to spaces, since actual tab characters are
" needed, and have indentation at 8 chars to be sure that all indents are tabs
" (despite the mappings later):
autocmd FileType make set noexpandtab shiftwidth=8 softtabstop=0
" ensure normal tabs in assembly files
" and set to NASM syntax highlighting
autocmd FileType asm set noexpandtab shiftwidth=8 softtabstop=0 syntax=nasm
The section should be self-explanatory, but I suggest you read the vim help on filetype and autocmd.
The most relevant line to you, is probably this one:
autocmd FileType make set noexpandtab shiftwidth=8 softtabstop=0
make sure filetype detection is switched on, though.
Best Answer
You can use Ctrl+D to back up one tab stop. This actually moves the whole line to the left one tab stop; Ctrl+T does the same thing to the right. Note that these keystrokes only work in Insert mode (use
<<and>>for the equivalent in Command mode).