In vim it's as simple as :%s/\s* $// (okay, not that simple if you don't spend time in regex or in the shell) and git can hide whitespace only changes in diffs.

In vim it's as simple as :%s/\s* $// (okay, not that simple if you don't spend time in regex or in the shell) and git can hide whitespace only changes in diffs. Just don't check in trailing whitespace. If you need to clean up a whole codebase you can throw in something like find -name * .java | xargs sed -i 's/\s* $//' and just commit that once. Sidebar: How do I print an asterisk and a char without adding in whitespace.