As has been pointed out in a couple of other answers, the preferred method now is NOT to use smartindent, but instead use the following (in your .vimrc):
filetype plugin indent on
" show existing tab with 4 spaces width
set tabstop=4
" when indenting with '>', use 4 spaces width
set shiftwidth=4
" On pressing tab, insert 4 spaces
set expandtab
In your [.vimrc:][1] file:
set smartindent
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
The help files take a bit of time to get used to, but the more you read, the better Vim gets:
:help smartindent
Even better, you can embed these settings in your source for portability:
:help auto-setting
To see your current settings:
:set all
As graywh points out in the comments, smartindent has been replaced by cindent which "Works more cleverly", although still mainly for languages with C-like syntax:
:help C-indenting
In :w !sudo tee %...
% means "the current file"
As eugene y pointed out, % does indeed mean "the current file name", which is passed to tee so that it knows which file to overwrite.
(In substitution commands, it's slightly different; as :help :% shows, it's equal to 1,$ (the entire file) (thanks to @Orafu for pointing out that this does not evaluate to the filename). For example, :%s/foo/bar means "in the current file, replace occurrences of foo with bar." If you highlight some text before typing :s, you'll see that the highlighted lines take the place of % as your substitution range.)
:w isn't updating your file
One confusing part of this trick is that you might think :w is modifying your file, but it isn't. If you opened and modified file1.txt, then ran :w file2.txt, it would be a "save as"; file1.txt wouldn't be modified, but the current buffer contents would be sent to file2.txt.
Instead of file2.txt, you can substitute a shell command to receive the buffer contents. For instance, :w !cat will just display the contents.
If Vim wasn't run with sudo access, its :w can't modify a protected file, but if it passes the buffer contents to the shell, a command in the shell can be run with sudo. In this case, we use tee.
Understanding tee
As for tee, picture the tee command as a T-shaped pipe in a normal bash piping situation: it directs output to specified file(s) and also sends it to standard output, which can be captured by the next piped command.
For example, in ps -ax | tee processes.txt | grep 'foo', the list of processes will be written to a text file and passed along to grep.
+-----------+ tee +------------+
| | -------- | |
| ps -ax | -------- | grep 'foo' |
| | || | |
+-----------+ || +------------+
||
+---------------+
| |
| processes.txt |
| |
+---------------+
(Diagram created with Asciiflow.)
See the tee man page for more info.
Tee as a hack
In the situation your question describes, using tee is a hack because we're ignoring half of what it does. sudo tee writes to our file and also sends the buffer contents to standard output, but we ignore standard output. We don't need to pass anything to another piped command in this case; we're just using tee as an alternate way of writing a file and so that we can call it with sudo.
Making this trick easy
You can add this to your .vimrc to make this trick easy-to-use: just type :w!!.
" Allow saving of files as sudo when I forgot to start vim using sudo.
cmap w!! w !sudo tee > /dev/null %
The > /dev/null part explicitly throws away the standard output, since, as I said, we don't need to pass anything to another piped command.
Best Answer
Here's my recommendation for things to try:
syntax onis in your .vimrc:echo &t_Co). If it's 8 you'll want tose t_Co=16. You might also tryse t_Co=256though withoutlet g:solarized_termcolors=16this will use the 256 fallback mode, which isn't quite the correct color scheme.I'd comment on the question above for the following, but karma of 50 is required. Please do email me via the project site to troubleshoot this further as I am in the process of establishing a good walkthrough for common color issues.