Tag Archives: whitespace

Trailing whitespaces are a pain in the ass. Adding, deleting and modifying code can lead to invisible spaces at the end of the line. This is “bad” and useless.

Here comes Vim!
:%s/\s\+$//

A substitution command :%s/<search>/<substitute>/
Where the search is for trailing whitespaces \s\+$ and the substitute is “nothing”.

Writing this every time is too much effort, it’s a good idea to define a user command:
:command Deltw :%s/\s\+$//

Or better, add the line to your vimrc file:
command Deltw :%s/\s\+$//

now just typing the command Deltw deletes those annoyances.

References

Vim patterns ⇒GO
Vim user_commands manual ⇒GO