Indent the middle of multiple lines

Question

I often run into situations like this:

title : Jekyll Bootstrap
tagline: Site Tagline
author :
  name : Name Lastname
  email : [email protected]
  github : username
  twitter : username
  feedburner : feedname

Where the arguments are not lined up well, is there a standard way in vim for to have it formatted with each of the according arguments aligned to the nearest indent where an indent is defined as 2 spaces without having to go through line by line to the, such as in the following:

title   : Jekyll Bootstrap
tagline : Site Tagline
author  :
  name      : Name Lastname
  email     : [email protected]
  github    : username
  twitter   : username
  feedburner: feedname

UPDATE:

I believe tabular.vim is the plugin I am looking for but I am having a difficult time forming a regular expression which would take into account the number of spaces at the beginning of the line when deciding something should be part of a block, i.e. Tabularize/: produces:

title       : Jekyll Bootstrap
tagline     : Site Tagline
author      :
  name      : Name Lastname
  email     : [email protected]
  github    : username
  twitter   : username
  feedburner: feedname

The is an example in the documentation where the following is achieved via a regular expression:

abc,def,ghi
a,b
a,b,c

:Tabularize /^[^,]*\zs,/r0c0l0

abc,def,ghi
  a,b
  a,b,c

But I am unsure how to formulate this when consider each line with the same number of spaces in front part of the same block while still evaluating subblock such as in the following more complex than my original example:

comments :
  provider : disqus
  disqus :
    short_name : jekyllbootstrap
  livefyre :
    site_id : 123
  intensedebate :
    account : 123abc
  facebook :
    appid : 123
    num_posts : 5
    width : 580
    colorscheme : light

would be transformed tabularize\some_regular_expression_I_cant_figure_out to:

comments :
  provider      : disqus
  disqus        :
    short_name    : jekyllbootstrap
  livefyre      :
    site_id       : 123
  intensedebate :
    account       : 123abc
  facebook      :
    appid         : 123
    num_posts     : 5
    width         : 580
    colorscheme   : light

Helpful [screen cast](http://vimcasts.org/episodes/aligning-text-with-tabular-vim/) — rudolph9, Apr 05 '12 at 15:11

Bernhard · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-05T18:37:29.840

4

The Tabularize plugin for vim can do exactly what you want. It comes down to typing Tabularize /:

This will probably not keep the indentation on the left however.

Edit on your updated question: I was not able to do that with Tabular directly, but I was able to do this with a second command, which is a search and replace on a range:

 :%s/\([ ]*\)[[:alpha:][:punct:]]*[ ]*/\0\1/

This searches for a certain amount of spaces in front of the :, and pastes them just before this semicolon.

edited Apr 05 '12 at 18:37

answered Apr 05 '12 at 12:43

Bernhard

11,992
4
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69

thank you for your answer, that is exactly what I'm looking for but would you mind taking a peek at my latest update to the question? – rudolph9 Apr 05 '12 at 15:06
1

I couldn't achieve that with Tabular, but offer a work-around in an edit. – Bernhard Apr 05 '12 at 18:39
There has to be a way to accomplish this via a single command! – rudolph9 Apr 05 '12 at 23:51
Off course, if you dig into the Tabularize plugin you are certainly able to implement this. Good luck :) – Bernhard Apr 06 '12 at 08:19

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 08 '12 at 02:33

So, bad news and good news. The bad news is that Tabular can't really do what you're asking for without a bit of work - the problem at hand requires more context than Tabular normally has access to. The good news is that Tabular is designed to allow being used as an extremely flexible general text manipulation tool, and in that context it's not too tough to get Tabular to do what you want.

Create a file named ~/.vim/after/plugin/TabularizeRecord.vim with these (hopefully heavily commented enough) contents:

" Create a new tabular pipeline named 'record' that includes all adjacent
" lines containing a : in its default range, and manipulates those lines by
" passing them through the TabularizeIndentedRecord function
AddTabularPipeline! record /:/ TabularizeIndentedRecord(a:lines)

function! TabularizeIndentedRecord(lines)
  " A list containing each of the lines with leading spaces removed
  let text = map(copy(a:lines), 'substitute(v:val, "^ *", "", "")')
  " A list containing just the leading spaces for each line
  let spaces = map(copy(a:lines), 'substitute(v:val, "^ *\\zs.*", "", "")')
  " Tabularize only the text, not the leading spaces.  This pattern is more
  " complicated than just /:/ to handle lines with multiple colons.
  call tabular#TabularizeStrings(text, '[^:]*\zs:', 'l1')
  " Tack the spaces back on to the beginning of each line, and store the
  " resulting lines back in the a:lines list
  call map(a:lines, 'remove(spaces, 0) . remove(text, 0)')
endfunction

Once that file exists, restart vim, and you should then be able to get the indenting you want by doing:

:Tab record

As far as I can tell, the end result of that is exactly what you're looking for - let me know if it doesn't work out for some reason, though, or if I misunderstood the requirements.

Indent the middle of multiple lines

2 Answers2