NOTE: These settings will cause as many hard tabs as possible being used for indentation, and spaces will be used to fill in the rest.

• If you want to distinguish between “indentation” and “alignment”, i.e., the number of hard tabs equals the indentation level, use the Smart Tabs plug-in.

• The principle is to set set shiftwidth and set softtabstop to the same value, leave expandtab at its default (noexpandtab).
  • Usually, tabstop is left at its default value.