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

Here's part of my .vimrc:

set autoindent
set expandtab
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4

This works well for me because I absolutely do not want tabs in my source code. It seems from your question that you do want to keep two tabs and seven spaces on the next line, and I'm not sure there's a way to teach vim to accommodate that style.