If you are looking for enabling auto indentation and to set tabstop to x characters, you are in right place.
Open your .vimrc under your "/home/<user>" directory and add below lines
Now open a file with vim and your indentation and tabstop will work as expected.
Open your .vimrc under your "/home/<user>" directory and add below lines
filetype plugin indent on
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
In above settings we have set 4 as tabstop and shiftwidth.Now open a file with vim and your indentation and tabstop will work as expected.