relative-indent

Hide unnecessary leading indent

Install

Use of a plugin manager is recommended. vim-plug is what I use. Note that this plugin requires the wrap option to be off to work, but you might not miss it as much with the extra room.

Plug 'fent/vim-relative-indent'
set nowrap

In order to provide for flexibility, relative-indent is not enabled by default. Using an autocmd to enable it per buffer is recommended.

augroup relative_indent
  autocmd!
  " Apply to all filetypes except markdown and quickfix
  autocmd FileType * :RelativeIndentEnable
  autocmd FileType markdown :setlocal wrap
augroup END

Additional Configuration

Using the list option with precedes provides a helpful marker for when indent has been hidden.

set listchars+=precedes:<
set list

Note that using precedes with tabbed files don't show correctly, see vim/vim#5927

If you'd like to know how many levels of indent are hidden, use w:relative_indent_level. This can be used in your statusline for example.

This is my configuration with lightline

let g:lightline = {
  \ 'active': {
  \   'left': [
  \     ['relative_indent', 'mode', 'paste'],
  \   ],
  \   'right': [['lineinfo'], ['percent'], ['fileformat', 'filetype']],
  \ 'component_function': {
  \   'relative_indent': 'LightlineRelativeIndent',
  \ },
  \ }

function! LightlineRelativeIndent()
  return repeat('<', get(w:, 'relative_indent_level', 0))
endfunction

sidescrolloff can affect this plugin's ability to scroll the view. If you use vim-sensible, which does set sidescrolloff=5, but you want to set sidescrolloff=0 you can do something like

augroup relative_indent
  autocmd!
  autocmd FileType * :setlocal sidescrolloff=0 | :RelativeIndentEnable
augroup END