Re: How to display and copy tabs as tabs in GTK env?

On Friday, October 25, 2024 at 7:22:12 AM UTC-7 Christian Brabandt wrote:

I am not sure I understood the question completely.

Ok, let's try this.  Let's make a test document, enter this in your terminal (as I'm entering in my gnome-terminal window):

vim tabtest

i0        1         2
12345678901234567890

<tab>1<tab>2<esc>:wq

So the first two lines will count spaces and the last two lines will count tabs, with the last line starting with a tab.

Now display it with more:

more tabtest

Visually, the two tab lines are shown with a 7-character wide space in between, with an 8-character wide space at the beginning of the last line.

Now, try to select the area between 0 and 1 with your mouse, put your pointer under the 4 and click and drag to the 5, like you were trying to select "45", but in the white space underneath.  Since more printed a tab, a tab is selected, and the selection expands to cover the width of the tab:

This can be copied/pasted as a tab anywhere now with whatever your favorite method is (^⇧C/^⇧V, right-click context menu copy/paste, ^Ins/⇧Ins).

Now, display it with vim and try to do the same, it won't let you.  It'll select 2 spaces under the "4" and "5", even tho listchars is showing a tab is there, which i defined with some box drawing chars (set lcs=eol:┤,tab:╾┈╸,space:⎵):

it also does the same thing if i set nolist:

Hope that helps explain the issue better.

 

But if you want to
copy the actual values instead of the visual representation of thte
characters on the screen, please learn to use the clipboard register,

Thanks, I know how to use vim's clipboard, but it's internal only and I need to copy/paste between different servers i'm connected to (via SSH) and that just won't work.

Interestingly, and maybe a hint for a complete solution, if I load up gvim instead, which loads in a GUI window, it works as expected.

 However, this won't work when I need to copy something from a remote server.  The retab! command that BJP mentioned is helpful, and maybe what I just have to do going forward, but it would be nice if vim just displayed the tabs properly.  Not sure what magic it's doing when run from a terminal and not sure why that is useful for anyone either...

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