automation - How can you automatically remove trailing whitespace in vim

Question

I am getting 'trailing whitespace' errors trying to commit some files in Git.

I want to remove these trailing whitespace characters automatically right before I save Python files.

Can you configure Vim to do this? If so, how?

Answer 1

I found the answer here.

Adding the following to my .vimrc file did the trick:

autocmd BufWritePre *.py :%s/s+$//e

The e flag at the end means that the command doesn't issue an error message if the search pattern fails. See :h :s_flags for more.