snippet of vimrc to set tabs to 2 spaces

.vimrc

" Copy and paste below line into remote vim sessions that aren't configured:
set tabstop=2 softtabstop=0 expandtab shiftwidth=2 smarttab

" Add the following to your ~/.vimrc to make it permanent:
set tabstop=2       " The width of a TAB is set to 4.
                    " Still it is a \t. It is just that
                    " Vim will interpret it to be having
                    " a width of 4.

set shiftwidth=2    " Indents will have a width of 4

set softtabstop=0   " Sets the number of columns for a TAB

set expandtab       " Expand TABs to spaces

" Use :retab to convert existing tab to spaces

" Cargo-Culted from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1878974/redefine-tab-as-4-spaces