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| author | Franck Cuny <franckcuny@gmail.com> | 2016-07-31 10:16:40 -0700 |
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| committer | Franck Cuny <franckcuny@gmail.com> | 2016-07-31 13:42:48 -0700 |
| commit | 63f413891d5adc596e4d51dfba4d0d23fdea3ca4 (patch) | |
| tree | c2726b60515057a20f434bd89c596360ef17852b /content/post/2015-07-25-dont-remove-white-spaces.md | |
| parent | Add Google Analytic tracker. (diff) | |
| download | lumberjaph-63f413891d5adc596e4d51dfba4d0d23fdea3ca4.tar.gz | |
Stop generating a static site.
Diffstat (limited to 'content/post/2015-07-25-dont-remove-white-spaces.md')
| -rw-r--r-- | content/post/2015-07-25-dont-remove-white-spaces.md | 62 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 62 deletions
diff --git a/content/post/2015-07-25-dont-remove-white-spaces.md b/content/post/2015-07-25-dont-remove-white-spaces.md deleted file mode 100644 index 4b421ea..0000000 --- a/content/post/2015-07-25-dont-remove-white-spaces.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,62 +0,0 @@ ---- -date: 2015-07-25T00:00:00Z -summary: In which I explain why removing blindly white spaces is harmful -title: Don't blindly remove trailing white spaces ---- - -I don't like trailing white spaces in my source code. I've configured my editors to highlight them -so I don't add them by accident, and when possible, I remove them. But it doesn't mean that all of -them should be removed blindly. - -In this post, I'm talking about files that are managed by a SCM. When working on such a text file, -editor's hooks that delete them when writing a file can be more annoying than keeping them in place. -A change should only touch lines that are relevant to the fix or feature beeing added. Touching -lines that are not relevant are creating noise in the history. I've made this mistake in the past, -and I've learned my lessons. - -## Pain for the reviewer - -The person who will review the change will have to make an extra effort to understand why the diff -highlight some lines where it looks like there's no change. It's a distraction to his main task, and -it doesn't bring any benefit to the change beeing submitted. - -## Pain for the person browsing the history - -When someone browse the history and try to understand what changed between two versions, the -deletion is just noise. It's already hard to make the mental effort to read a diff, and understand -what and why things have changed. Adding some extra noise is annoying. - -Running a tool like `git blame` shows how useless this is, for both the person reading the history -and the author. - -## Tips - -Configure your editor to highlight them. If you are using Emacs, you can do it with - -``` -(require 'whitespace) -(global-whitespace-mode 1) -(setq whitespace-style '(face trailing tabs tab-mark)) -``` - -With vim, you can add the following: - -``` -set list lcs=trail:·,tab:»· -highlight ExtraWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red -``` - -It's also possible to configure `git` to highlight them when running `git add -p`, by running - -``` -git config --global core.whitespace trailing-space,space-before-tab -``` - -`git` will complain if it finds white spaces in your change, so you have time to fix and remove -them. - -If you really don't want any trailing white spaces, you can also configure your SCM with a -post-commit hook to reject commits that contains them. - -If you're using `vimdiff` to read a diff, it's possible to not highlight white spaces with `set -diffopt+=iwhite`. This can makes it a little bit easier to read messy diff. |