This simple plugin will strip the trailing whitespace from the file you are editing. However, it does this only on the lines you edit or visit in Insert mode; it leaves all the others untouched.

I wrote this plugin because I work with people whose editors don't clean up whitespace. My editor (Vim) did strip all whitespace, and saving my edits caused a lot of extraneous whitespace changes that showed up in version control logs. This plugin gives the best of both worlds: it cleans up whitespace on edited lines only, keeping version control diffs clean.

If you don't have a preferred installation method, I recommend installing pathogen.vim, and then simply copy and paste:

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone git://github.com/thirtythreeforty/lessspace.vim

For basic usage, just install it and forget it. LessSpace works automatically.

LessSpace provides a couple commands that allow you to turn it on or off, either globally or per-buffer. The global commands are:

• LessSpace: Turn on whitespace stripping
• LessSpace!: Turn off whitespace stripping

The per-buffer commands are very similar:

• LessSpaceBuf: Turn on whitespace stripping
• LessSpaceBuf!: Turn off whitespace stripping

LessSpace doesn't offer many configuration options, because everything happens automatically when you enter and leave Insert mode.

You can disable LessSpace on startup by setting the g:lessspace_enabled variable:

let g:lessspace_enabled = 0

(The same effect can be achieved after startup by just running :LessSpace!.)

By default, LessSpace strips whitespace after normal mode operations (such as when you paste something from a register). If you don't want this, you can have LessSpace only work in insert mode by setting g:lessspace_normal:

let g:lessspace_normal = 0

You can also specify the filetypes that it operates on by specifying a filetype whitelist or blacklist. (Perhaps, for example, you're writing Whitespace.) You can change this by setting either of the g:lessspace_whitelist or g:lessspace_blacklist variables, preferably in your vimrc file. These variables should be lists of the desired filetypes. For example, to only operate on Vim and Ruby files, you could use:

let g:lessspace_whitelist = ['ruby', 'vim']

And to operate on everything but diff files (this is the default):

let g:lessspace_blacklist = ['diff']

(Previously, the whitelist had to be specified as a regex string. This has been deprecated and removed; you should update to the list-based method.)

If LessSpace bothers your plugin, you can call these functions to temporarily disable it while your plugin runs:

call lessspace#TemporaryDisableBegin()
call lessspace#TemporaryDisableEnd()

In such cases, please file an issue on GitHub to see if we can make the integration better!

Copyright © 2015-2018 George Hilliard. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself. See :help license.