dedent.el

dedent.el makes it easy to copy and paste text while treating indentation intelligently.

The primary operation, dedent-string,takes a block of text, identifies the line with the least indentation, and removes that indentation from every line. dedent.el provides several supporting commands built on this operation:

• dedent-yank pastes such that the first non-white character is at point, and will maintain relative indentation on subsequent lines.

• dedent-kill kills a piece of text and then runs dedent-string on the text.

• dedent-extend-indentation will add spaces to blank lines to give them the same indentation as the next non-blank line.

  This behavior was specifically designed for copying blocks of code into the Python REPL, where empty lines are interpreted as end-of-function.

Sample Usage

Load dedent.el and bind keys as you see fit. For example, I bind dedent-kill with extend-indentation in python-mode:

(require 'dedent)

(defun python-kill ()
  (interactive)
  (dedent-kill t))
 
(add-hook 'python-mode-hook
          '(lambda ()
             (define-key python-mode-map (kbd "C-M-w") 'python-kill)))