[cturner]

Well - it's my tool of choice for editing Makefiles. :) But that's all I use it for. My vim setup automatically hammers tabs to spaces, and make doesn't like that.

Shell users who use emacs mode (most ppl) may be annoyed by ctrl+a missing.

[throwaway125]

The following line in your vimrc will make vim not expand tabs for every file named "Makefile".

    au BufRead,BufNewFile Makefile set noexpandtab

[cturner]

Wow - this thread is full of good advice. I have not touched my dot files in about four years, and today they're all getting an upgrade. Thanks!

[X-Istence]

At least in my vim, Makefiles are automatically set to noexpandtab even-though I have it set to automatically expand tabs for everything else.