Text Dedenter

Dedenting removes leading whitespace from the beginning of each line — either a fixed amount (e.g. remove 4 spaces) or the minimum shared indent level (normalize). This is opposite of indenting and is useful for unindenting copy-pasted code blocks.

This mode finds the minimum number of leading spaces shared across all non-blank lines and removes exactly that amount from every line. The relative indentation between lines is preserved. Python's textwrap.dedent function works this way.

In fixed-amount mode, those lines are dedented to zero (no negative indentation is possible). In common-indent mode, all lines retain their relative indentation since only the shared minimum is removed.