pressing return in paragraph-indent-text-mode deletes whitespace indenting beginning of paragraph

Question

I'm currently using emacs 25.3 on Mac OSX installed using Homebrew, and without any modifications in my .emacs file or anywhere else. I think I may be fundamentally misunderstanding what paragraph-indent-text-mode is for. I enter paragraph-indent-text-mode using M-x. Then, I type four spaces (which from the documentation I'm assuming is supposed to indicate that I'm beginning a paragraph), then a few sentences that visually wraps around several times (with a \ (backslash) character). Then, I use RET to begin a new paragraph.

Strangely, the whitespace at the beginning of the text that I just typed gets deleted automatically.

Now I repeat a few more times, and each time I use RET, the whitespace that I inserted previously gets deleted automatically, which I find to be extremely odd. I'm not putting any blank lines between paragraphs, because I'm assuming that's the entire point of paragraph-indent-text-mode: that you don't need to. However, because of this automatic deletion, all the text that I have typed now belongs to a single paragraph.

There must be something that I am completely missing here; how am I supposed to be using this mode to write paragraphs, if the very action that I'm supposed to be taking to indicate that I'm starting a new paragraph always gets deleted every time I use RET?

Answer 1

After much face-palming, head-desking, and head-walling, I finally discovered the issue. paragraph-indent-text mode works PRECISELY as intended... or indented? What's happening is that electric indent is stepping on its toes. One way to fix it is to evaluate

(when (fboundp 'electric-indent-mode) (electric-indent-mode -1))

in your .emacs (init) file.