Deleting groups of autoindents in Insert mode

Question

In my .vimrc I have set backspace=eol,start, which allows me to backspace over line breaks and the start of what I wrote since I entered Insert mode. This does not allow me to backspace over autoindents though. For that one can add indent to the backspace list.

If one doesn't use indent they may be unable to delete an empty line they just added, because if an autoindent was created it cannot be deleted and therefore the line break cannot be reached and deleted.

On the other hand, when using indent the backspace key deletes only one tab at a time (not sure what it does when indenting with spaces). This can be annoying if you are writing say a deep nested loop.

So my question is: while in Insert mode, is there a way to delete all the autoindents in one line by using the backspace key only once?

Answer 1

I like to use Ctrl+U. If there are any characters on the line, it deletes to the beginning of the text. Press again to delete to column 1 (the indentation), and again to remove the line and put the cursor at the end of the line above. This is quicker than Ctrl+D when there are several levels of indent.

This requires indent set in your backspace option.

set backspace=eol,start,indent        " or set backspace=2

Answer 2

You can do 0<C-d> to delete all indent in the current line in insert mode.

-- edit --

The right way to get help for <C-d> in insert mode is :help i_ctrl-d. The i_ prefix indicates insert mode so you can also use v_ for visual mode or c_ for command-line mode. 0<C-d> is a few lines below <C-d>.