Disabling outline-style indentation in Org Mode

One thing that has driven me mad over the last months was the default indentation that Org Mode applies whenever you write something below a headline. Basically, content is always indented to visualise the hierarchy of the content. This is useful for outlining but I mostly use to Org for general note-taking (and even long-form writing from time to time) and there this default behaviour simply didn’t fit my writing style 🙂

So this would be Org’s default behaviour:

* Chapter
  level 1 indentation
  
** Deeper
   level 2 indentation

And what I want most of the time is this:

* Chapter
some content

** Deeper
no indentation here

This just works better for me especially when dealing with things like src-blocks etc. which have slightly different semantics when being indented (whitespaces FTW!).

Luckily, other folks have also had this issue and documented it for instance on StackExchange. Turns out that you can toggle this automatic indentation using the org-adapt-indentation flag:

" enable indentation
(setq org-adapt-indentation t)

" disable indentation
(setq org-adapt-indentation nil)

This variable can also have other values but nil is doing exactly what I want right now 😅 That being said, I might add a quick keyboard-toggle for this flag just in case I need to do more outlining again in the future…