> "On-the-Fly Reindentation" also has difficulty of interpretation. > Does there exist indentation that is "Not On-the-Fly"?  What would that > do? Yes, the behavior should be described clearly. "On-the-fly" can mean different things. What's important is just what the behavior is. A guess is that "on-the-fly" here means that indentation happens in an automatic or partly automatic way, as you edit/type normally. E.g., hit `RET' to get a new line, and you also get that new line indented. "On the fly" means any old time, in particular, while you are doing something else. It can mean that while doing something else you can hit a key to do something else, and then continue with what you were doing. Or it can mean that something happens automatically while you are doing something else. My guess is that the latter is what's meant here: hit `RET' to enter text on a new line (main action), and get also the extra action of indenting the text on that new line. Indenting that's not "on-the-fly"? You can manually, explicitly indent a block of text, using command `indent-rigidly', bound by default to `C-x TAB'. It indents lines that are at least partially in the region. See the doc string. You can incrementally increase and decrease the amount of indentation. And a prefix arg indents to exactly that number of columns. There can be any number of kinds of indenting. Some, like `indent-rigidly, can be initiated manually - just to indent. Others can be initiated automatically, in combination with some other activity or depending on the context.