Hey, some of us actually
use trailing whitespace! :-)
I use it to create useful indentation guides in Komodo. If the whitespace is stripped away, the indentation guides have gaps where there's a blank line in an indented block.
Maybe Komodo could use a different method to decide where to draw the lines that didn't depend on trailing whitespace. It looks like Sublime Text 2 has a different approach for its indentation guides - maybe the Komodo guys should look at that. But in the meantime I'm using Komodo as it actually works today, so the whitespace on blank lines is important. Let me keep it, please? :-)
I wouldn't mind stripping out trailing whitespace on nonblank lines - that wouldn't affect my precious indentation guides.
But wait a minute, what about Markdown? Two spaces at the end of a line to get a <br>, right? Does the bot skip Markdown files?
Finally, for the folks who have automatic whitespace removal in their editor settings... Please be careful: With this setting, you'll be very likely to make a commit that includes both significant code changes and a mass of whitespace changes in the came commit.
Those kinds of changes should be separated: one commit for the code itself, and a separate commit for the whitespace with a comment like "Whitespace cleanup, no code changes."
This allows people who diff the revision history to diff with whitespace significant most of the time, the only exception being when reviewing a whitespace-only change.
(Edited for friendlier tone...)