In my Emacs config I have enabled only electric-pair-mode to speed up some quotes and parens. Either this or something else also enables electric-indent-mode which produces weird cursor behaviour in Org lists, particularly when I disagree that I am in a list, so I have ended up suppressing electric-indent-mode explicitly by setting M-x customize-option RET electric-indent-mode off.
In pure coding situations, however, as opposed to prose writing, indenting is the norm, which is why it is lucky that there is a local version of electric indent:
(add-hook 'prog-mode-hook 'electric-indent-local-mode)Electric indentation produces indentation for code. Sometimes it is better to unindent some lines, i.e. to make the first non-whitespace character the actual first character of the line. Here is some code for this, which simply triggers fixup-whitespace at the beginning of line:
(defun unindent-this-line (&optional N)
"Remove whitespace at the beginning of current line. With a
numerical argument, do it on another line as per relative line
numbering."
(interactive "P")
(if (equal N nil)
(save-excursion
(beginning-of-line) (fixup-whitespace))
(save-excursion
(forward-line (prefix-numeric-value N))
(beginning-of-line) (fixup-whitespace))))And an unindentation function for the entire buffer:
(defun unindent-buffer ()
"Remove whitespace at the beginning of all lines."
(interactive)
(save-excursion
(let ((inhibit-message t) (message-log-max nil))
(replace-regexp "^\\s-+" "" nil (point-min) (point-max)))))Explanation line by line:
- Start of function definition
- Documentation
- Make it a M-x command
- Do not displace the cursor
- Suppress messages that the next line’s operations tend to emit
- Go through the entire buffer (respecting narrowing) and replace whitespace at the beginning of every line with an empty string. In the first quotes, also
"^[[:space:]]*"should do the same job, as thes-unindentfunction in the s-library suggests.
