30.12.3 Hungry Delete Feature in C

If you want to delete an entire block of whitespace at point, you can use hungry deletion. This deletes all the contiguous whitespace either before point or after point in a single operation. Whitespace here includes tabs and newlines, but not comments or preprocessor commands.

C-c C-<DEL>

C-c <DEL>

c-hungry-delete-backwards—Delete the entire block of whitespace preceding point.

C-c C-d

C-c C-<DELETE>

C-c <DELETE>

c-hungry-delete-forward—Delete the entire block of whitespace following point.

As an alternative to the above commands, you can enable hungry delete mode. When this feature is enabled (indicated by ‘/h’ in the mode line after the mode name), a single <DEL> deletes all preceding whitespace, not just one space, and a single C-c C-d (but not plain <DELETE>) deletes all following whitespace.

M-x c-toggle-hungry-state

Toggle the hungry-delete feature (c-toggle-hungry-state)¹. With a prefix argument, this command turns the hungry-delete feature on if the argument is positive, and off if it is negative.

The variable c-hungry-delete-key controls whether the hungry-delete feature is enabled.