I can't seem to find this answer anywhere, but I'm sure it's because I don't know the terms to search for. 

I'm currently working in a mixed shop, with my developers using a mix of emacs, vim, Notepad++, and whatever you call the alleged text editor that is part of Aginity. 

As you can imagine there are also great differences in opinion as to how to indent code (both spaces v.s. tabs, and how many spaces/tabs). Being a support guy I take no position on this, other than PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GHOD PICK ONE. I especially hate inconsistency inside a single file (???)

Vim has this feature called "modeline magic" (<http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Modeline_magic>) that lets me put: 

```
# vim: expandtab copyindent preserveindent softtabstop=0 shiftwidth=4 tabstop=4 filetype=py

```

"near" the top or bottom of a file and it tells vim to, well, you can follow that. (note for those who don't follow the link, the first character is a file-type dependent comment. In C++ it might be /\* ... \*/ or //. SQL would be -- etc. 

Surely Emacs has *some* sort of equivalent? 

EDITED TO ADD: 

Emacs and Vim mean something utterly different by "modeline" and "mode-line". Being a Unix Admin pretending to be a developer, I'm asking about the vim definition. 

If I'm just missing the obvious search terms, that would be cool too. 
(The tag is...probably wrong. If someone could make it more better, that would be good.) Basil Fixored it. Thanks Basil.