Trailing whitespaces don’t bother me in general, let’s be clear, I don’t like them but there are other thousands things that bother me more. Although I hate (with hate, I mean it) when someone sends me a patch and I can’t apply it cleanly because of the trailing whitespaces… in this moment I understand this guy and this other trailing whitespaces hater.
Since I use Vim I leave here some solutions to remove and highlight them automatically.
Add to your .vimrc
Remove:
autocmd FileType c,cpp,vhd,h,sv,svh autocmd BufWritePre <buffer> %s/\s\+$//e
Highlight:
highlight ExtraWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/ autocmd BufWinEnter * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/ autocmd InsertEnter * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+\%#\@<!$/ autocmd InsertLeave * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/ autocmd BufWinLeave * call clearmatches()
Got it from:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Remove_unwanted_spaces#Automatically_removing_all_trailing_whitespace
bradomyn 