Vim indent xml file

Question

I am learning Vim but I thought this was a simple task but I cannot get it to work. I have browser SO but the solutions are not working for me.

I am trying to correc

Answer 1

Short answer: Turn on matchit.vim. You can add packadd matchit to your .vimrc, or use vim-sensible, which enables it by default.

Long answer: I have tried many strategies to auto-indent XML in Vim, including the xmllint approach discussed on the Vim wiki. The problem with xmllint (and the same approach with other external CLI tools such as xmlformat and tidy, too) is that they all insist on squeezing out blank newlines. If all you want is to indent your XML, without removing blank lines, comments and/or other intentional formatting, then xmllint is not the best choice.

It turns out that Vim's equals (=) command already supports XML, as long as the matchit.vim script is enabled. One super easy way to enable it is to adopt tpope's vim-sensible. Another is to add packadd matchit to your .vimrc. Then, XML formatting will "just work" out of the box.