Tabbing visual selection in VIM

Question

In many GUIs when I select a section of text and then hit the Tab or Shift+Tab button the selected section will indent in or out.

I

Answer 1

Or, you can go the nearest brace and type =% in normal mode -- it indents the block covered by the brace and its matching one. But I'm not sure how this is useful in a language such as Python.

Answer 2

The following key map works like Brian's solution, But also keep the cursor position related to the word.

" tap indent movement (use mark `m' for cursor position)
vmap <S-Tab>  mm<`m:<C-U>exec "normal ".&shiftwidth."h"<CR>mmgv`m
vmap <Tab>    mm>`m:<C-U>exec "normal ".&shiftwidth."l"<CR>mmgv`m

Answer 3

Since I've abandoned vi to vim, I've never used > nor < again. I exploit vim automated indentation that can be explicitly triggered with =

It works very well to motions like =a{ which is even more efficient than =%

Otherwise, If one > isn't enough, just redo it with ., or undo the change with u.