How can you automatically remove trailing whitespace in vim

Paul D. Eden picture Paul D. Eden · Dec 10, 2008 · Viewed 67.1k times · Source

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

Paul D. Eden picture Paul D. Eden · Dec 10, 2008

I found the answer here.

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

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