Filetype configuration

When you set options in vemrc, those changes generally affect every document that you open with Vem. However, there may be cases in which you may want to have different settings for different types of archives. For example, when you're editing text in Markdown files, you may want to have the spell checker active and to make the editor breaking your lines automatically when they reach column 80 (or some other width), but not to do all this for the rest of files.

To add configuration for a particular file type, add a file with that configuration to:

~/.conf/vem/after/ftplugin/<filetype>.vim

where <filetype> is the type or file you want it to apply to. In the case of Markdown, the name of the file would be markdown.vim. Once you add that file, that configuration will only be loaded for files of that type.

Note that the path contains after/. In most distributions, Vim already provides a custom configuration for each file type. The after/ directory instructs Vim to load your configuration after any other global file type configuration happens so you can override it with your changes. Also note that the path might not exist and that you may need to create it before adding your files.

In the Markdown example, we could add the following content to that file:

setlocal textwidth=80
setlocal spell

It is important to use setlocal instead of set in file type configuration files so the changes only apply to the file that is being opened and not to all other files open independently of their type.

Check the next section Filetype Autodetection to know how to find the names of the supported filetypes and how they are automatically detected.

Indentation

One very common use case for custom options per file type is to change the indentation size/type. For example, you could have different configurations such as 4 spaces for Python files, 2 spaces for CSS files or 8 character wide tabs for C++ files.

In the case of C++, the file to add would be:

" ~/.conf/vem/after/ftplugin/cpp.vim

setlocal noexpandtab
setlocal tabstop=8
setlocal softtabstop=8
setlocal shiftwidth=8

And similar ones for the other file types (see Indentation for an explanation on these options).

Automatic indentation per file type

Apart from setting specific indent sizes for different file types, you can also enable automatic file type indenting. With it, every time you press Enter, the newly created line will be indented according to the syntax of the programming language. That is, it will use the keywords and the symbols of the programming language to determine what should be the most likely indentation level for each new line. For example, in languages that use curly brackets to delimit blocks ({, {), pressing Enter after an opening one, will increase the indent of the next line by one level.

Since automatic indenting per file type can be too smart and introduce indentation when you don't expect or want it, it is disabled by default in Vem. To enable it, add this to your vemrc file:

filetype indent on

If it is enabled by some file you're sourcing in vemrc but you prefer to have it disabled, add:

filetype indent off

To the end of the file.

Filetype Autodetection

When the editor opens a file, it will try to detect its filetype using it file extension or, in particular cases, inspecting its contents.

To know which filetype was assigned to a file once loaded, use:

:set ft?

For example, for a Go file, you'll get:

filetype=go

Sometimes the filetype of the file may not be correctly detected or not detected at all. This can happen with file extensions that less common or ambiguous.

In those cases, you can set the filetype manually:

:set ft=<filetype-name>

Or create a file .config/vem/ftdetect/<filetype-name>.vim with the following contents:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.<filetype-extension> set ft=<filetype-name>

If you set the filetype manually, the change will only apply to that open file. If you set the ftdetect file, the change will apply to any file with that extension in the future (remember to restart the editor after adding the file for this detection to work).

To know which filetype names are available in the system type:

:setfiletype <press-tab-to-autocomplete>

You can also autocomplete providing the first letters of the filetype to know if the one you are looking for is available.