I've been stuck many times looking at a vim buffer with little question marks at the beginning of each line and trying to get rid of them. for so long I didn't know what they were so trying to get rid of them was impossible.

It turns out they are tabs, and you can get rid of the little leading question marks with this substitution command.

:%s/\t/    /g

This is a til (today I learned) I'm posting them on my website and to twitter's #100daysoftils