How do I make Vim's indent commands always align to a clean shiftwidth boundary?

Explanation

shiftround causes indent commands (>, <, and their visual equivalents) to round the indentation level to the nearest multiple of shiftwidth rather than adding or subtracting a fixed number of spaces. This keeps indentation on clean column boundaries, especially useful when editing code with mixed or inconsistent indentation.

How it works

• Without shiftround: > always adds exactly shiftwidth spaces to whatever indentation the line already has
• With shiftround: > rounds up to the next multiple of shiftwidth; < rounds down
• Applies to >>, <<, > / < with motions, and visual indent operations

Example

With shiftwidth=4 and shiftround enabled:

Before: 6 spaces of indentation
After `>`:  8 spaces (rounded up to next multiple of 4)
After `<`:  4 spaces (rounded down to previous multiple of 4)

Without shiftround those would become 10 and 2, breaking alignment relative to surrounding code.

Tips

• Add to your vimrc alongside your tab settings: set shiftwidth=4 shiftround
• Particularly valuable when working in mixed-indentation codebases where some lines start at odd column positions
• Works correctly even with expandtab enabled (operates on soft spaces, not hard tabs)