Intro

Although electric-indent-mode will be on by default in Emacs 24.4, most of the time it is used only in the most straightforward way possible: the major mode adds some characters to electric-indent-chars, and after the user types one of them, the current line gets reindented.

This limits us to electric indentation only after specific characters, not keywords, and without regard to the context.

However, electric-indent-mode allows a more advanced behavior, and for that one needs to set electric-indent-functions.

So far, only two modes bundled with Emacs use it: ruby-mode and perl-mode, and the latter only to disable electric indentation whenever point is not at the end of the line.

Motivation

But when we write a function, we can look at the full symbol before point, see if it’s a keyword, and if it starts at indentation, or if it was a keyword before we typed the last character. We can look at the character after point and see whether we just turned a continuation method call into a straight metod call, which does not need additional indentation.

Examples

| denotes the cursor position.

# before
if foo
  bar
  els|
end

# after
if foo
  bar
else|
end

# before
if foo
end|

# after
if foo
  ends|

# before
foo
|

# after
foo
  .|

# before
foo
  |.bar

# after
foo
t|.bar

The above list is based on my personal preference, so please let me know how it works for you.

Hopefully, this general behavior will also spread to other major modes.