Subject: bug#24766: 26.0.50: [PATCH] Confusing behaviour for indent-relative-maybe

From: Alex <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2016 14:43:57 -0600

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

> Like I said, I don't think the behavior should be changed, only the
> documentation, which is somewhat misleading.  If we want some
> different behavior, we could have a new function, or a new value of
> the argument to indent-relative.
>
> Thanks.

What about changing `indent-relative-maybe' and adding an extra argument
to `indent-relative'? Since `indent-relative-maybe' has had that
docstring for a good 15 years, and the name fits the new behaviour more.

Then in Emacs core we can replace the single instance of it with
(indent-relative t). The corresponding diff:

diff --git a/lisp/indent.el b/lisp/indent.el
index 0f6c68d..675b6b8 100644
--- a/lisp/indent.el
+++ b/lisp/indent.el
@@ -566,9 +566,9 @@ indent-relative-maybe
 
 See also `indent-relative'."
   (interactive)
-  (indent-relative t))
+  (indent-relative nil t))
 
-(defun indent-relative (&optional unindented-ok)
+(defun indent-relative (&optional first-only unindented-ok)
   "Space out to under next indent point in previous nonblank line.
 An indent point is a non-whitespace character following whitespace.
 The following line shows the indentation points in this line.
@@ -594,17 +594,18 @@ indent-relative
 	    (if (> (current-column) start-column)
 		(backward-char 1))
 	    (or (looking-at "[ \t]")
-		unindented-ok
+		first-only
 		(skip-chars-forward "^ \t" end))
 	    (skip-chars-forward " \t" end)
 	    (or (= (point) end) (setq indent (current-column))))))
-    (if indent
-	(let ((opoint (point-marker)))
-	  (indent-to indent 0)
-	  (if (> opoint (point))
-	      (goto-char opoint))
-	  (move-marker opoint nil))
-      (tab-to-tab-stop))))
+    (cond (indent
+           (let ((opoint (point-marker)))
+             (indent-to indent 0)
+             (if (> opoint (point))
+                 (goto-char opoint))
+             (move-marker opoint nil)))
+          (unindented-ok nil)
+          (t (tab-to-tab-stop)))))
 
 (defcustom tab-stop-list nil
   "List of tab stop positions used by `tab-to-tab-stop'.