Pasting with vim and indentation issues

If you use vim often - you probably had to paste something into vim from the outside source. And, if you have corresponding indentation rules, they will get applied, turning your nice block of code into something that looks more like a case of stairs:

def foo(a, b):
        a, b = b, a
            print "I am doing something important."
                return a - b

Quite nasty, isn’t it? But that’s where vim’s paste option comes in. Before pasting, execute :set paste. If you go into insert mode, you’ll see the usual mode indicator switch to -- INSERT (paste) --. Try pasting the same block of code now:

def foo(a, b):
    a, b = b, a
    print "I am doing something important."
    return a - b

Beautiful. Don’t forget to switch back to a regular mode by executing :set nopaste.