guess-indent.nvim VS vim-sleuth

Instead of setting setlocal tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2 in each file, I recommend using the following plugin: guess-indent.nvim. It provides automatic indentation style detection for Neovim, which can simplify the process.

The fantastic nmac427/guess-indent.nvim package is used to automatically detect the indentation scheme when a file is opened.

In addition to editorconfig, which other comments have mentioned, there are also plugins that can set your indentation options based on the presence of tabs or spaces in the files you have open. I like guess-indent.nvim.

I use a combination of guess-indent.nvim and :h listchars. Here's how I use them together in my config.

If you want to have a different indentation based on the current file context, take a look at this plugin: https://github.com/NMAC427/guess-indent.nvim

I'd add guess-indent to that list as well, if you're working on a project that doesn't have a set standard on indentation.

I use this plugin guess-indent.nvim

NMAC427/guess-indent.nvim - Automatic indentation style detection for Neovim

In addition to setting tabstop and shiftwidth, you might also like this plugin: https://github.com/tpope/vim-sleuth

vim-sleuth auto detects tab size so...

Just add https://github.com/tpope/vim-sleuth and never worry about it again.

At the end of the day I don't really care which a project goes with, I've always just used vim-sleuth to automatically set my tab key to input whatever the current file's indentation is.

VsCode has an internal function from auto-detecting indentation, while my config uses vim-sleuth with indent-blankline.nvim.

If you work a lot on legacy codebases, https://github.com/tpope/vim-sleuth is probably more what you need than editorconfig, as it will work even when one is not present.

The primary advantage of using it is that it has built in heuristics for detecting line wrapping when opening a file (with some Treesitter magic for Markdown to make it more accurate), and also allows for manual swapping between wrapping types. You can think of it as the wrapping equivalent to vim-sleuth.

I just found about Tim Pope's sleuth: https://github.com/tpope/vim-sleuth It supports editorconfig but it also seems to have just better heuristics when an editorconfig file isn't present, so I just decided to replace `editorconfig-vim` with it.

Another solution is try sleuth.vim, that sets automatically your indentation based on the project, buffer and editorconfig