Unindenting code snippets

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.