enabling modeline support in vim

If you ever wondered why

# vim:ts=4:sw=4:et:

Doesn't work by default is because it's been disabled at the distribution level for security reasons. To get around this add this snippet to your local vimrc or system wide if you're feeling bold.

if exists("+modelines") 
     " the following is required because of SuSE's paranoid /etc/vimrc 
     " and to force 'modeline' on even for root in Vim 7.0.237 and later 
     set modeline modelines=5 
     " the following disables a dangerous modeline in one helpfile 
     if has ('autocmd') 
         au BufReadPost ada.txt setl nomodeline ft=help 
     endif 
endif