Question

I have enabled several C cleanups for Emacs by setting the c-cleanup-list variable, and then enabling electric and auto-newline modes. Unfortunately, this only formats the code as you’re typing it. I would like to format code that has already been written. Is there a quick way to do this?

Cheers!

Answer 1

I employ a simple cleanup function:

(defun cleanup-buffer ()
  "Perform a bunch of operations on the whitespace content of a buffer."
  (interactive)
  (indent-buffer)
  (untabify-buffer)
  (delete-trailing-whitespace))

that I’ve assigned a global keybinding to:

 (global-set-key (kbd "C-c n") 'cleanup-buffer)

You can put your cleanups in a similar function and invoke it instead. You can also make Emacs trigger such a function on buffer save(or some other event) – have a look at the after-save-hook.