Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Apply Customizations to Certain Types of Files

Our preferences may vary from one type of file to another. For example, suppose that we work with a house style that advises two spaces for indentation in Ruby and four-column-wide tabs for JavaScript. We could apply these settings by putting the following lines in our vimrc:

customizations/filetype-indentation.vim

if has("autocmd")
  filetype on
  autocmd FileType ruby setlocal ts=2 sts=2 sw=2 et
  autocmd FileType javascript setlocal ts=4 sts=4 sw=4 noet
endif

The autocmd declaration tells Vim to listen for an event and to execute the specified commands whenever that event fires (:autocmdⓘ). In this case we’re listening for the FileType event, which is triggered ...