Re: the war on trailing whitespace

On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 12:16:25PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

 > Few enough people run "git-apply" on its own. Most people (certainly me)
 > end up using it through some email-applicator script or other. So the plan
 > was that the --whitespace=warn/error flag would go there, and that
 > git-apply by default would work more like "patch".
 >
 > But hey, I have no strong preferences, and it's easy enough to make the
 > default be warn (and add a "--whitespace=ok" flag to turn it off).
 >
 > Personally, I don't mind whitespace that much. In particular, I _suspect_
 > I often have empty lines like
 >
 >	int i;
 >
 >	i = 10;
 >
 > where the "empty" line actually has the same indentation as the lines
 > around it. Is that wrong? Perhaps.

I think I have the same anal-retentive problem Andrew has, because I have ..

highlight RedundantSpaces term=standout ctermbg=red guibg=red match RedundantSpaces /\s\+$\| \+\ze\t/

in my .vimrc, which highlights this (and other trailing whitespace) as a big red blob. I do this in part for the same reason Andrew does, so that when someone sends me a diff with a zillion spaces at the EOL, it screams at me, I spot them, and chop them out.

		Dave