How to preserve indent after pressing Esc in Vim

Question

I have set autoindent
I go to a line, press A and <CR> which gets me to the next line and inserts an indent. However if I press Esc the cursor jumps to the beginning of the line and the indent is gone.
I have to go about and press tabs to get to the right place again.

I know the help says:

If you do not type anything on the new line except <BS> or CTRL-D and then type
<Esc>, CTRL-O or <CR>, the indent is deleted again.

Is there a way to disable this, or at least a workaround?

Answer 1

I had this exact problem until two days ago.

There is no way to disable this, but luckily, you don't need to, because instead:

Enter insert mode with S or cc. Entering insert mode again with S will enter insert mode with the proper level of indentation, making the fact that Vim deleted the indents unimportant.

Note: I found that this trick worked for me most places. But for some reason, it did not work with Python files. I'm guessing it's something to do with the Python filetype messing with its own indentation functions, or something along those lines.

Edit:

Another trick, you can define cpoptions in a way that, if you're on a line with an indent and move the cursor, it will preserve the indent. This won't solve your problem of hitting Esc right away, but it's a related issue that might also be bothering you.