How to align list items in vim [duplicate]

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Vim: source code formatting (3 answers)

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Say I have PHP code which looks like this

$values = array(
    'foo' => 'bar',
    'longfoo' => 'otherbar',
    'baz' => 'foobar,
);

Is there a way in Vim to align the array values and format it like following?

$values = array(
    'foo'       => 'bar',
    'longfoo'   => 'otherbar',
    'baz'       => 'foobar,
);

Minor note: I use spaces, not tabs for indenting.

Answer 1

The tabular plugin would make that easy. After installing that you could simply run

:Tabularize /=>/

while on any of the lines which are to be aligned. If you use that same pattern often, you could even setup a mapping to do that even faster.

Answer 2

Tabularize sounds like the way to go, but I will also mention the Unix utility column, which is pretty nifty and more people should know about.
Unix-specific, obviously. (On openSuSE 12.3, it's in the util-linux package; likely different on other distributions.)
To invoke it within vim, visually select the lines you want to align, then
:!column -t
So with the visual range that vim fills in for you when you hit : with lines selected, you get:
:'<,'>!column -t
(By default it separates on whitespace, but you can change that with the -s <separator> option.)
It aligns things such that each column is just long enough for its longest member.

Answer 3

I suggest the plugin Align. It has some very handy shortcuts, like \tsp could let you align columns by spaces quickly.