Re: indentation

[Joost Kremers]

On Tue, Apr 27 2021, Gregory Heytings wrote:
>> I'm constantly annoyed by too aggressive automatic indentation when editing.
>> Basically when I press enter, the cursor on the new line is automatically
>> moved to the column of first character of the preceding line. This is in the
>> Fundamental mode.
>>
>
> Yes, the default meaning of RET has changed in Emacs 24.4: 
> electric-indent-mode
> is enabled by default, which means that RET reindents the current line and
> indents the next line.  You can disable this by adding (electric-indent-mode 
> -1)
> to your init file.

Note that each new version of Emacs comes with a News file that describes all
the changes made in that version, esp. user-visible changes. There's usually
also information on how to get back the old behaviour (unless it's something
obvious, like disabling a minor mode, as is the case with indentation here).

So whenever you upgrade Emacs, it's always a good idea to check the News file,
which can be done easily in Emacs itself with `C-h n`. Keep in mind, though,
that if you skip a major version, the News file only contains changes for the
current major version, so anything that was changed in the version you skipped
won't be there. In that case, googling for "Emacs XX news" with XX being the
major version should get you the relevant News file.

I just thought I'd mention this because the change you encountered was made in
Emacs 24, while you say you upgraded to Emacs 25 (note, though, that Emacs 25.3
is already three and a half years old), so you wouldn't have found this change
by looking through the News file.

HTH

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments