Electric indent: Inserting blank lines with no whitespace while keeping cursor indented?

Question

I do a lot of python coding and am trying to determine if electric indent can be customized to help me with the following scenario:

Let's say my cursor (point) is at the end of the following excerpt, at the 'X':

if (some_condition):
    do_something()
    and_do_something_else()X
return

If I hit RET, the cursor is moved to the next line immediately below the 'a'. Great. BUT... if all I want to do is insert a blank line, I will quickly move point somewhere else, and then some unwanted whitespace is left in the empty line:

if (some_condition):
    do_something()
    and_do_something_else()X
.... # <-- unwanted whitespace left here
return

Binding RET to electric-indent-just-newline does not give me what I want, because that causes the cursor, in this scenario, to go to column 0.

I guess what I'm looking for is a clean way to:

• Automatically move the cursor to the same level of indentation as the previous line if I hit RET, BUT
• If the subsequent line just needs to be a newline / blank line, don't poop it up with whitespace.

Or do I need to resort to calling the function that deletes trailing whitespace?

Please let me know if I need to clarify the problem I'm trying to solve.

Answer 1

You can add just a newline after point with open-line, which is bound to C-o by default, and it will work in pretty much every major mode out there. It might take a little bit before you get used to it, but it saved me a LOT of keystrokes and time because of how often I need to perform such an operation.