When you paste a block of text into a Putty window, many times you’ll get an increasing number of leading tabs. Not so if you use gnome-terminal (IIRC). Quite annoying in a Windows world.

Strip tabs and spaces out from current position to the end of the file with: ` :.,$s/^[]*\s*// `

Or perhaps you only want a small block in the middle of the file changed. First, turn on line numbers.

` :set number `

Then search and replace on specific line numbers (in this example lines 15 through 41). ` :15,41s/^[]*\s*// `

Then use Ctrl-V (down arrow or h,j,k,l keys to select block) and hit “>” to re-indent. Works much better than reformatting by hand.