corriander / vim-markdown-indent

Sane auto-indentation for markdown in Vim

Markdown Auto-Indent

Indent-parsing for markdown syntax.

Defines and sets a function for indentexpr; a more sophisticated and filetype-specific method of determining the correct indentation-level than cindent (for C syntax, clue in the name) and smartindent (for everything else).

Rationale

For a long time I put up with Vim's smartindent feature for my auto-indentation needs. After too much time spent fighting various cases (particularly lists in markdown) I've since seen the error of my ways and now use filetype-based indenting. The only issue here is that a function needs to be designed to allow Vim to determine the correct indentation.

vim-markdown does provide one but as far as I could tell it doesn't work. I bit the bullet and started throwing one together myself based on that as a starting point.

It's early days, but so far the clouds have parted and rays of shiny indenty light are now illuminating my Vim writing experience. Not only does this make things more pleasant to work with it helps pandoc parse correctly.

Install

This is going to be pretty terse and a little bit RTFM as there are multiple things in play here, but basically:

1. Copy/symlink indent/markdown.vim into a directory where vim can find it. For example:

   ~/.vim/indent/markdown.vim
   ~/.vim/after/indent/markdown.vim
   

   (yes, I know, I'll ensure this is bundle-friendly ASAP).

2. Ensure that filetype indenting is on. This might involve something like the following in ~/.vimrc:

   filetype indent on			" or...
   filetype plugin indent on	" etc.
   

3. The docs reckon setting indentexpr (which is what this does) will override smartindent, but I've not looked into this.

YMMV.

Usage/Features

Well, it's autoindent. Everything should probably just work as long as everything is set up right (see :help fo-table for tweaks).

Some notes:

• Markdown allows you to write lazy lists. This corrects them (if you manage to make them in the first place!).
• It tries to be sensible about what it indents. For example: 2+ blank lines are considered to be a semantic break so it won't try and fix the indent. I'm sure other cases have slipped through the net.
• So far, all the canonical list examples seem to check out. I don't know how nested blockquotes and code blocks work but they do; I've not checked nested lists.

TODO

• Make sure this works with Pathogen and Vundle.
• Pandoc list-like extensions.