A Better Way to Indent Your Entire Buffer in Emacs?

As an Emacs user, you’ve probably found yourself wanting to clean up the indentation of an entire file. The standard approach is to select all (C-x h) and then run indent-region (I think, correct me if I am wrong!), but this has an annoying side effect: it destroys your current mark position, which might have been carefully set for other operations.

Also, and just whisper it and don’t tell anyone, but I have been using VSCode a little (only for work, of course!) and an indent by default seems to indent the whole file, which initially I thought would be really annoying, but actually it feels quite natural, as always at some point I would like to indent my code.

This is Emacs however and there is a simple solution and I’ve added it to my Emacs configuration:

So, just a recap on some typical workflow, it goes a little something like this:

1. You’re working in a file with inconsistent indentation
2. You want to fix the entire buffer’s formatting
3. You run C-x h (select all) followed by M-x indent-region
4. Your mark is now at the beginning of the buffer, disrupting your workflow

This is particularly frustrating when you’ve set a mark for a specific editing task and want to preserve that position.

(defun indent-whole-buffer ()
  "Indent the entire buffer without affecting point or mark."
  (interactive)
  (save-excursion
    (save-restriction
      (indent-region (point-min) (point-max)))))

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c i") 'indent-whole-buffer)

The function indents from (point-min) to (point-max), covering the entire buffer, then restores everything to exactly how it was before, except now with proper indentation.

After adding this to your configuration, simply press C-c i (or whatever keybinding you prefer) to indent your entire buffer. Your cursor stays put, your mark remains set, and your file gets beautifully formatted!