To me, moving around faster using only the keyboard is an editor feature. My experience is with emacs but to go from the left margin to the first non-whitespac

To me, moving around faster using only the keyboard is an editor feature. My experience is with emacs but to go from the left margin to the first non-whitespace character across a vast swath of spaces in auto indent mode, I just press <tab> once. I'm sure other editors have something similar. If you're iterating over the whitespace manually you are doing it the slow way :).