Introduction
Indentation of external program sources is a common problem. Some people use 2 spaces, some 4 spaces, some tabulations, some (horror!) mix tab and spaces. Text editors have usually options helping to deal with the way you indent your files. Pressing tab will insert spaces of tabulations depending on your settings. However, it only works properly with your own files, which have been indented in your own way.
As soon as you start editing external sources, you are likely to face a different indentation. Then your careful editor setting will simply fuck up the file you edit unless the guy did use the same indentation as yours. And you may not notice it. For example if I indent with tab but sets them to be displayed as four columns and if I edit a file indented with 4 spaces, all the lines I create will be indented with tab. They will render fine on my editor, but probably not on someone else's editor.

It is especially annoyhing if you program in python as the indentation is part of the program structure.

I haven't found (yet) an editor that deals properly with this problem. The solution however is simple: the text editor must find the indentation used within a file and tune its settings according to this. This is what Indent Finder does.



Description
Indent Finder is a python script that reads a file and tells you what indentation is used inside the file. The indentation analysis works on any language. It was tested successfully with C, C++, python and Java code.
The current version provides helps for the integration with vim. I hope other editors will pick either the script or the idea, and that auto-detecting indentation will become common amongst text editors. I am releasing the code under the BSD License to encourage this.

The script is written in python because it was quick and easy way to write it.

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