Question

There are times that I have a code snippet that I want to post on a defect tracker, wiki, forum, etc. but it’s deeply indented in the code. I usually have to highlight the code snippet, hit <shift>-<tab> until the indents aren’t so bad, then copy/paste and then revert the code. It gets somewhat painful.

Is there a tool that can remove the tabs in front of the each line? Note that I don’t want to remove all tabs from all lines, just same preceding number of tabs from each line. I’m thinking some function of Emacs could do this.

Here’s an extreme example:

Before:

                            //This is usually some method in an anonymous inner class' anonymous inner class.
                            @Override
                            public void method(){
                                doSomething();
                            }

After:

//This is usually some method in an anonymous inner class' anonymous inner class.
@Override
public void method(){
    doSomething();
}

Notice how doSomething() still has a single tab in front of it.

Answer 1

Rectangle selection is my preferred way of doing this.

Put yourself at the beginning of the first line, C-space, go to the last line, and the end of the indentation you want to remove and C-x r k (rectangular kill). That does it.