Apply changes to .vimrc to source file

Question

Im currently making a lot of changes in my .vimrc. At the same time Im also coding away on a project. To fix the new indentation and tabstop rules, and so on, I have to go through every line and re-indent them. This seems a little bit tedious.

Is there any way to apply the newest changes in my .vimrc to the whole source file?

Answer 1

Your problem seems to be that existing buffers do not get the updated (global) values of eg 'tabstop' , because these are buffer-local options. Therefore, a simple :so % after editing the ~/.vimrc isn't sufficient.

There are several possible approaches:

Use sessions

With the current Vim state persisted via :mksession , you can safely :quit Vim, restart it, :so session.vim , and have the identical editing state, but with the new settings applied (this requires that you :set sessionoptions-=options )

Manually apply

You can eg :yank the changed :set tabstop=... commands that you've edited and reapply them to all existing buffers, eg by moving there and :@" , or (if there are many) with the help of :bufdo .

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Note that especially the indent settings can also be set from ftplugins , so your global settings may not be effective. You can check that for a buffer with :verbose set tabstop? .