Fast tab-switching in vim

Working with a lot of different code bases means working with a lot of different coding styles. When code uses tab characters for indenting it makes things a lot easier - it lets the user decide how deep they would like each indent level to be. With the following macro I can change the display with of tab characters from the file’s default (often set with a vim modeline) to 1 character. This helps massively with deeply nested code and fitting everything on to one screen.

This code snippet maps the F8 key to a function, s:ToggleTabs() that toggles tabs in the current vim buffer between being the default width and being one character wide. The s: makes sure the function is local to the current script to avoid clashing with other plugins.

It sets the vim variables tabstop, shiftwidth and softtabstop to ensure that tabs behave consistently in display, when shift and when in insert mode. They’re set in a buffer-local context (that’s the b: prefix) to ensure they only affect the current buffer.

"map <F8> to toggle small/normal tabs
noremap <F8> :call <SID>ToggleTabs()<CR>

"Toggles tab size between the default width and 1 character width
"b: buffer-local variables
"&l: buffer-local options
"see :help internal-variables
function! s:ToggleTabs  ()
	if !exists("b:tab_toggler_large")
		let b:tab_toggler_large = 1
	endif
	if b:tab_toggler_large == 0 
		let b:tab_toggler_large = 1	
		let &l:ts = b:tab_toggler_ts
		let &l:sw = b:tab_toggler_sw
		let &l:sts = b:tab_toggler_sts
	else
		"save the previous tab settings
		let b:tab_toggler_large = 0
		let b:tab_toggler_ts = &ts
		let b:tab_toggler_sw = &sw
		let b:tab_toggler_sts = &sts
		let &l:ts = 1
		let &l:sw = 1
		let &l:sts = 1
	endif
endfunction