如何在vim中扩大空间？

Question

I recently installed the window manager awesome, and started to use xterm. While configuring the font, I came accross this webpage: https://cjshayward.com/terminal/printer.html that makes the really good point that you don't have to make the font bigger to get more easily readable code, but only to make the spaces between words wider.

How can I achieve this in vim?

Answer 1

It's not possible. Vim uses a fixed size per character (as it's running in a terminal), and therefore the only way to change this is to change the font or font size. To achieve a different character/letter spacing you'll need to either edit the font or choose another.

Answer 2

The only hack I can think of is replacing every space character with its double-width companion, U+3000 ideographic space:

:%s/ /\=nr2char(0x3000)/g

You could use :autocmd s to undo this before, and redo after saving, but I wouldn't recommend this.

Unfortunately, the conceal feature only handles single-width characters so far. It would make for a far better workaround.

Answer 3

@Ingo this is what I added to my .vimrc:

"doubles space in insert mode    
inoremap <space> <space><space>

if !exists("autocommands_loaded")
        let autocommands_loaded = 1

        "doubles spaces when reading file
        au bufRead *.cpp        silent %s/ /  /g

        "for :w
        au bufWritePre *.cpp    silent %s/  / /g
        au bufWritePost *.cpp   silent %s/ /  /g

        "for :wq
        au quitPre *.cpp        silent %s/  / /g
endif