[aaronbrethorst]

That's because manually indenting text in HN's commenting field is a tedious, error-prone process, and I am a profoundly lazy person. ;)

[eric-hu]

If you use Firefox, I highly recommend ItsAllText. It lets me right click on a textarea and open the contents with my editor of choice. When I save the file, whatever I wrote is automatically copied back over to the textarea.

Bulk indentation is one of the main reasons I switch over to vim for editing web text.