Remove indentation

The real case: text copied out of a PDF or an email

Some texts drag spaces along at the start of every line: quoted replies inside emails, blocks copied from a laid-out PDF, answers pasted from a chat. When you put them back into a document, that invisible indent throws off the alignment, and the word processor's automatic tidying doesn't remove it. Here it disappears in one go across all the lines at once.

What gets removed

Only the spaces and tabs at the start of each line, up to the first thing that isn't a space. The rest of the line is untouched: spaces between words stay, punctuation stays, the lines stay as many as they were, and empty lines stay empty. It's a targeted clean-up, not a rewrite.

Where NOT to use it

If the text is code, the indent isn't decoration: in Python it's the thing that says where a block starts and ends, and removing indents means breaking the program. In other languages too, the code becomes unreadable. If your code's problem is tabs showing up at different widths everywhere, the right page is Tabs to spaces, which makes them consistent instead of throwing them away.

Nearby tools

For double spaces between words and the ones left at the end of a line there is Remove extra spaces; to drop the empty lines in between, Remove empty lines. If instead you have to stitch back together a text that came out of a PDF broken line by line, that's the job of Fix text copied from a PDF.