Vim Remove Trailing Whitespace

If you’re a text neat freak like me, then trailing whitespace — extra space characters at the ends of lines — can make your blood boil. The hallmark of an untidy developer, trailing whitespace can clutter up diffs, visually disrupt the viewport, and make moving around editors cumbersome.

There are a few related tricks for dealing with trailing whitespace in Vim that I’ll bundle up here. But remember that if you’re working in version control, such as Git, there are things like pre-commit hooks that can also deal with trailing whitespace.

Display Trailing Whitespace in Vim

First off all, you can display trailing whitespace in Vim with listchars. Try the following:

set listchars=trail:-

This will display trailing whitespace characters as a hyphen, subtly displaying them to you as a visual indicator.

Vim Remove Trailing Whitespace

Heres a simple one-liner you can use to remove all the trailing whitespace in Vim:

:%s/\s\+$//e

Automatically Trim Trailing Whitespace in Vim

If you want to remove all the trailing whitespace from a certain filetype automatically, add this to your .vimrc:

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

You could use simply * there for all filetypes but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are probably some filetypes where trailing whitespace is necessary. Instead, use specific file types.

The main disadvantage to these substitutions is that it will leave your cursor in a different place. Toggling display of whitespace off and on isn’t easy either. That’s why there are also many plugins that deal with trailing whitespace in more elegant ways.

Vim Trailing Whitespace Plugins

One of the nicest plugins is Trailer Trash. After installing the plugin, your trailing whitespace will be automatically highlighted in red. Plus, you’ll have several commands:

• :TrailerTrim – Trims trailing whitespace from current buffer. Puts the cursor back to where it was and resets the search highlight.
• :TrailerToggle – Toggles trailing whitespace display. Great for when you’ve given up on fighting with your coworkers.

Here’s a short gif demonstrating the substitution method and the plugin method. Notice the difference in where your cursor lands. I also published a video on YouTube showing how to remove trailing whitespace in Vim.

Frequently Asked Questions

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