Show Trailing Whitespace in Markdown Files with vim-better-whitespace
Trailing whitespace is important in Markdown since having 2 spaces will add a single line break. You may not want to strip that.
I’ve been using https://github.com/ntpeters/vim-better-whitespac for a long time which is a very nice plugin to show and automatically strip trailing whitespace from any file on save. At least that’s how I configured it.
Out of the box it supports not applying to Markdown files and other files like
diffs where stripping trailing whitespace isn’t ideal because it has meaning.
For example in Markdown adding 2 spaces at the end of the line will add a
<br>.
However, out of the box it also never showed whitespace in the files it didn’t apply to. That was problematic for me because I wanted to see that whitespace in Markdown files but not have it stripped on saved. That helps me know if I have accidental trailing whitespace.
Turns out this is easy to do!
First, you can disable stripping whitespace on Markdown files:
autocmd FileType markdown DisableStripWhitespaceOnSave
After that you can tweak better whitespace’s blacklist:
let g:better_whitespace_filetypes_blacklist=[]
This list defaults to ['diff', 'git', 'gitcommit', 'unite', 'qf', 'help', 'markdown', 'fugitive'] but I want whitespace to be shown for all of these
file types. With the first setting their whitespace won’t be stripped. Feel
free to adjust this to your preferences.
That’s it. Now you’ll see whitespace in Markdown files but it won’t be stripped on save. I commit this in my dotfiles recently.
After configuring this I ran grep -R ".*\s$" against my directory of 500+
blog posts written in Markdown and found quite a few cases where I had a
hanging space after a sentence or a bunch of extra spaces within a code block.
The video below demonstrates how this works.
# Demo Video
Timestamps
- 0:17 – Spaces being shown in Markdown but not other file types
- 1:22 – Checking out the plugin’s settings
- 2:06 – Configuring it to do what we want
Reference Links
Did you configure this? Let me know below!