emacs - stop adding indentation to current and next line when pressing RET

Question

I have a file open called test.scss, and when I press RET on a line, emacs will add 2 spaces to the current line and 4 extra spaces to the next line.

I've highlighted what the file looks like with whitespace-mode.

before pressing RET

after pressing RET

You can see that the .my-element row was auto-indented by 2 spaces, and the new line is indented by 4 spaces too many.

I want the output to look like this instead

desired output

What can I do to make emacs produce my desired output?

Here is the output of describe-mode:

Enabled minor modes: Auto-Composition Auto-Compression Auto-Encryption                 
Electric-Indent File-Name-Shadow Font-Lock Global-Eldoc                                
Global-Font-Lock Line-Number Menu-Bar Tooltip Whitespace                               

(Information about these minor modes follows the major mode info.)

SCSS mode defined in `css-mode.el':
Major mode to edit "Sassy CSS" files.

In addition to any hooks its parent mode `css-mode' might have run,
this mode runs the hook `scss-mode-hook', as the final step
during initialization.

Although in this case I'm in scss-mode, I see similar behavior with most of the other modes I use, such as ruby-mode, sgml-mode, js.el mode and others. I'd like to make the behavior match the desired output shown above.

Answer 1

Each mode can handle indentation in its own way, and you may have to look for mode-specific settings to get two-space indentation working everywhere.

For starters, you can set css-indent-offset, which should cover css-mode and scss-mode:

(setq css-indent-offset 2)

You can set the basic indenting of many other modes similarly. ruby-mode seems to use ruby-indent-level, sgml-mode uses sgml-basic-offset, and js-mode uses js-indent-level.