31.11.3 Hungry Delete Feature in C
If you want to delete an entire block of whitespace at point, you
can use hungry deletion. This deletes all the contiguous
whitespace either before point or after point in a single operation.
Whitespace here includes tabs and newlines, but not comments or
preprocessor commands.
- C-c C-<BS>
- C-c <BS>
c-hungry-backspace
—Delete the entire block of whitespace
preceding point.
- C-c C-d
- C-c C-<DEL>
- C-c <DEL>
c-hungry-delete-forward
—Delete the entire block of whitespace
following point.
As an alternative to the above commands, you can enable hungry
delete mode. When this feature is enabled (indicated by ‘/h’ in
the mode line after the mode name), a single <BS> command deletes
all preceding whitespace, not just one space, and a single C-c
C-d (but not <delete>) deletes all following whitespace.
- M-x c-toggle-hungry-state
- Toggle the hungry-delete feature
(
c-toggle-hungry-state
)1. With a prefix argument,
this command turns the hungry-delete feature on if the argument is
positive, and off if it is negative.
The variable c-hungry-delete-key
controls whether the
hungry-delete feature is enabled.