There are 2 ways to go about it.

Use Python Indent extension

This extension is required as an addition to main Python extension as that by default doesn't handle whitespaces for some reason. It's pretty much the most basic support.

Use an autoformatter

Then you have options for more advanced autoformatting like:

• Ruff
• Black

They're slower as they do much more, but if you want to efficiently and understandably program in Python, you'll have to get familiar with one at some point. Ruff is more recommended nowadays as it has more capabilities and it's written in Rust, so it's faster.

You can also run both Python Indent and autoformatter on file save, if you don't want to autoformat too frequently, which I'd definitely recommend as the way to go.

Use the reindent.py script that you find in the Tools/scripts/ directory of your Python installation:

Change Python (.py) files to use 4-space indents and no hard tab characters. Also trim excess spaces and tabs from ends of lines, and remove empty lines at the end of files. Also ensure the last line ends with a newline.

Have a look at that script for detailed usage instructions.

NOTE: If your linux distro does not have reindent installed by default with Python:

Many linux distros do not have reindent installed by default with python --> one easy way to get reindent is to do pip install reindent.

p.s. An alternative to pip is to use your distros package manager (i.e. apt-get, yum, dnf) but then you need to figure out what package has the command line tool because each distro has the tool in a different package.