Vim: How to Remove Trailing Whitespace on Save in Vim

John John (304)
2 minutes

Trailing whitespace can be a real pain - especially when diffing changes between two versions of a file. Fortunately for vim users, there is an easy way to eliminate unwanted trailing whitespace without having to think about it.

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Your .vimrc file is typically located in your home directory. So you can edit it by typing:

vim ~/.vimrc

Then adding the following line to your .vimrc will ensure that every time you save a file (:w), it will remove all trailing whitespace.

autocmd BufWritePre * :%s/\s\+$//e

Trailing whitespace will now be removed from the file when using the Vim editor.

Once you learn to think in text objects, you'll never be the same
Dayne Dayne (57)
5 minutes

Any vim user knows that there are underlying concepts worth understanding. While learning the specific keystrokes is useful, I find that knowing the why is crucial to actually adopting new features.