"Remove Trailing Whitespace" should not be on by default

[ceejayoz]

Indented blank lines is a pretty common use case. Having them destructively removed by default is going to lead to a lot of confusion when users inadvertently commit massive whitespace changesets they didn't notice on saving to their Git repos.

[mokkabonna]

Couldn't disagree more. The problem is having those trailing whitespace there in the first place. Best way to deal with this in a project is to run a strip whitespace script on all your files, then commit just that. Clean, simple, solves the problem for the future. Keep the option on by default.

[benogle]

Very strongly agree with @mokkabonna. We would like to keep this default on.

[ceejayoz]

It seems odd to be destructively (as in changes to every file saved without any significant indication it's happening) enforcing coding style preferences as a default. I've worked with a number of folks who like blank lines indented.

That said, not my editor. Thanks for listening, and it's awesome thus far.

[jeffbmartinez]

@ceejayoz was right for at least one person, definitely caused a bit of confusion for me. I like the feature overall, but if you're taking feedback, a one time notification of some sort could be nice so your users know that atom is modifying their files in a non-obvious way.

Either way, keep up the good work!

[pierreozoux]

I would say it's better as an opt-in also... By default I don't like tools to take decisions for me. Just if I configure it...

[clintharris]

+1 for opt-in

[Shnick]

+1 for opt-in

Using https://github.com/zhengjia/rstrip to clean our projects up.

[martindale]

How is this disabled in the first place?

+1 for opt-in

[rustycoat]

+1 for opt-in

Makes a mess of jade files where for logic's sake and the syntax-hilighlighter's sake you want to maintain the indent level even across blank lines. It took me quite a while to figure out that atom was destroying my indents on save...

[rustycoat]

@martindale Atom->Preferences then search for Whitespace on the left to get to the whitespae package's preferenes. Then unclick "remove trailing whitespace."

@ceejayoz is on the money: making destructive changes a default is nonsense.

This is the second 'bug' I ran into in atom within the first couple days of switching to it which seems to come comes form coding-style preferences being unintionally enforced. (The other is atom/text-buffer#11 -- a bug that only affected users who prefer to use hard tabs). Perhaps the development community was not diverse enough in the beginning phases of the project.

[ceejayoz]

@benogle Any chance this can be reconsidered?

[benogle]

We're inclined to leave it the way it is. You can disable it. We'd like to encourage folks to have clean files with no unnecessary whitespace.

[jeffbmartinez]

If you're keeping it as it, it would be nice to have a notification of some sort saying that the file is being modified in a non explicit way. It's just good practice to let users know of features that are not obvious. Personally, I would have never ended up here 6 weeks ago if I'd just known that atom was the one modifying my files without me telling it to do so. I get the feeling this is true for others as well.

As far as the disabling goes, I can't disable a feature I don't know exists.

[rustycoat]

@benogle What you call 'clean files' in this instance is quite problematic for the jade syntax highlighter. If the level of indent is taken away between lines of jade the parser things I've left a block. The :markdown filter is a good test case where this happens constantly.

Best practices vary by language, unfortunately; enforcing them in unexpected ways makes little sense for an editor that aims to be as respectably modular and language-neutral as Atom.

I can very easily make the argument that your 'clean files' are syntactically rather messy in my particular use case.