Vim puts a lot of tab characters when pasting code from clipboard

Question

I copied the code from github page. When i pasted it on my vim editor, it puts four tab characters for every indented block. It looks like this,

All tab characters are printed as ^I because of set list in .vimrc. my .vimrc looks like this,

set backspace=indent,eol,start
set nocompatible
set smartindent
set tabstop=2
set list
set tags=~/pytags
set statusline+=%F

Answer 1

Vim is trying to format your code as you paste. Use paste mode before pasting anything into vim

:set paste

Paste your contents, then unset it

:set nopaste