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Comment by xyzzyb | Hacker News Reader

Ah, aggressive trailing whitespace removal. That I can completely get behind. I've already got command-s bound to a custom macro that strips trailing whitespace in TextMate for myself and my co-workers; but this would be an even more inclusive solution.

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Fantastic. If you use vim, you should have this in your .vimrc:

" Remove any trailing whitespace that is in the file

autocmd BufRead,BufWrite * if ! &bin | silent! %s/\s\+$//ge | endif

I prefer using the vim-trailing-whitespace plugin and fixing it manually: https://github.com/bronson/vim-trailing-whitespace

Or you can use my competing plugin: https://github.com/bitc/vim-bad-whitespace

which has some advantages (described in the README)

One advantage taken from the readme:

  This plugin is better than using the builtin vim 'list' command because it
  doesn't show an annoying highlight while you are typing in insert mode at the
  end of a line.

Or, if you prefer a more manual approach (ie. my fellow paranoid developers) simply use `list` and `listchars`:

    set list
    set listchars=trail:•

In other people's code, use `set nolist` to prevent hyperventilation.

In general, explore `help list`.

Uhm. Why is this annoying, other than the fact that it shows up in your git commits?

If you use Vim from the terminal to edit text (which I do), trailing whitespace shows up as big white blocks. It's slightly visually distracting, but it's really just an OCD thing.

No.

Absence or presence of trailing whitespaces is sometime significant, such as in big ereg in re.VERBOSE mode in Python.

Therefore, it must be visible, and if it is visible it must be removed when it has no use.

I prefer to have my editor strip that whenever I save a file without any manual action.

I should clarify that command-s is the save command. My macro overrides the standard behavior.

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