Tabs and spaces in vim

Question

How do I prevent vim from replacing spaces with tabs when autoindent is on?

An example: if I have two tabs and 7 spaces in the beginning of the line, and tabstop=3

Answer 1

Maybe the bottom of this can help you?

Standard vi interprets the tab key literally, but there are popular vi-derived alternatives that are smarter, like vim. To get vim to interpret tab as an ``indent'' command instead of an insert-a-tab command, do this:

set softtabstop=2