Remove Trailing Whitespace in Vim

So once you know how to find and replace text in vim, you can easily replace trailing whitespace on lines of code with the following:

:%s/\s\+$//g

• : – issue VIM command
• % – the buffer in the current window
• s – substitute
• \s – regex for whitespace
• \+ – regex for one or more
• $ – found at the end of the search result
• // – the text to replace the whitespace with – nothing
• g – replace every instance found

Done. If you’d like to remove all whitespace upon file save (:w) then add the following to your .vimrc

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function! TrimWhiteSpace()
    %s/\s\+$//e
endfunction

nnoremap <silent> <Leader>rts :call TrimWhiteSpace()<CR>

autocmd FileWritePre * :call TrimWhiteSpace()
autocmd FileAppendPre * :call TrimWhiteSpace()
autocmd FilterWritePre * :call TrimWhiteSpace()
autocmd BufWritePre * :call TrimWhiteSpace()

:)