More than a year ago, I expressed some frustration about cindent in vim. My main complaints about it were that it made bad decisions about indentation on some languages that were not strictly C-syntax (perl, python, javascript).

Tonight I decided that I wanted to automate indenting to the closest '(' as in:

if (foo() and bar()
    and baz):
    ^ Want to indent to here, somehow, on command.

The 'cindent' feature of vim lets you configure this to happen automatically, but in some cases it won't indent properly: ie; a comment with a ( at the end of the line, for example, will screw it up.

I got tired of dealing with it, so I went back to autoindent, and I've been happier ever after. Fooling around tonight, I started working on a vim function to basically do exactly what I needed. An hour later, it was done. In the process, I wanted to confirm the default actions of ctrl+f in insert mode, which lead me to the cinkeys docs, which clued me that 'cindent' only autoindents on certain occaisions.

All of my time was wasted, it seems, after I figured out setting this option:

set cinkeys=!^F

Now cindent only activates when I hit ctrl+f. If I have both autoindent and cindent enabled, with this cinkeys setting, the default indentation behavior is exactly autoindent, and I can invoke cindent at will.

The following is now set in my .vimrc:

set autoindent
set cindent                     " Use c-style indentation
set cinkeys=!^F                 " Only indent when requested
set cinoptions=(0t0c1           " :help cinoptions-values

If you're interested in the vim script I wrote, which I no longer need, you can download it here: paren_indent.vim