Add feature to WMD for re-aligning code blocks

Question

Quite often I see code formatted like this in questions:

   foo
   bar
   hello

If the code consists of sufficiently long lines, it ends up looking like this:

                                                                 foobasdsdlfkasdlfksdfoobasdsdlfkasdlfksd

It'd be nice if there was a way (an icon to click or a magic keyboard incantation perhaps) to correct those two code blocks to:

foo
bar
hello

and

foobasdsdlfkasdlfksdfoobasdsdlfkasdlfksd

respectively.

Presumably this could work by looking at the lowest number of spaces x in the selected block, and then reducing the number of initial spaces on each line by x-4.

Obviously, there are a small minority of languages where spaces are meaningful that this might change the meaning of, but in most cases I think this would be useful.

I'm aware that I can cut and paste the code into my editor of choice to do this, but it'd be nice if there was some built-in way to do this.

Answer 1

There's two big issues with code formatting that leads to side-scrollitis:

1. excessive intendation
2. excessively long lines

#1 can be solved by removing excessive indentation or by converting 8-space tabs to 4 spaces.
#2 can be solved by inserting more line breaks, e.g. turning

MyFunction(reallyreallylongarg1, reallyreallylongarg2, reallyreallylongarg3, reallyreallylongarg4, reallyreallylongarg5, reallyreallylongarg6);

to:

MyFunction(reallyreallylongarg1, reallyreallylongarg2,
    reallyreallylongarg3, reallyreallylongarg4,
    reallyreallylongarg5, reallyreallylongarg6);

#1 could possibly be done programmatically by the site, but #2 depends on the syntax of the language and is best done by a human who can decide the best reformatting based on context. But we've got lots of users with editing privileges; does this really need to be addressed programmatically?

tl;dr: This is what 2000+ reputation users are for! If you see badly formatted code, step in and clean it up! All hail the Junior Janitor!

Answer 2

You can use Ctrl+K repeatedly to delete all except the last N % 4 spaces.

Answer 3

It's open source! You can add that feature yourself!

http://code.google.com/p/wmd-new/