vim clipboard whitespace – Why Does Vim Indent Pasted Code Incorrectly?

clipboardvimwhitespace

In Vim, if I paste this script:

#!/bin/sh
VAR=1
while ((VAR <  10))
    do
        echo "VAR1 is now $VAR"
        ((VAR = VAR +2))
    done
    echo "finish"

I get these strange results:

#!/bin/sh
#VAR=1
#while ((VAR <  10))
#       do
#                       echo "VAR1 is now $VAR"
#                                       ((VAR = VAR +2))
#                                               done
#                                                       echo "finish"
#

Hash signs (#) and tabs have appeared. Why?

Best Answer

There're two reasons:

For pasting in vim while auto-indent is enabled, you must change to paste mode by typing:

:set paste

Then you can change to insert mode and paste your code. After pasting is done, type:

:set nopaste

to turn off paste mode. Since this is a common and frequent action, vim offers toggling paste mode:

set pastetoggle=<F2>

You can change F2 to whatever key you want, and now you can turn pasting on and off easily.

To turn off auto-insert of comments, you can add these lines to your vimrc:

augroup auto_comment
    au!
    au FileType * setlocal formatoptions-=c formatoptions-=r formatoptions-=o
augroup END

vim also provides a pasting register for you to paste text from the system clipboard. You can use "*p or "+p depending on your system. On a system without X11, such as OSX or Windows, you have to use the * register. On an X11 system, like Linux, you can use both.

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