For the love of OCD, show whitespace in your IDE

9 Comments

• To highlight any trailing whitespace in Visual Studio, I stringly recommend Mads Kristensen's extension: https://github.com/madskristensen/TrailingWhitespace
  

• I just have Visual Studio tell me when a file contains a mixture of tabs and spaces, then I can just click a button to convert all tabs to spaces.
  

• erm... no thanks
  

• In all my years of programming C# I've never once had trailing spaces cause even the smallest problem.
  

• Cool!
  Lets take something that makes zero difference to the compiler and zero difference to anyone that doesn't share the same OCD tendencies and turn it into something to distract away from, you know, productivity. :)
  

• Well, sure, it's only causing problems if you are blessed with OCD. Hence the title. :)
  I now have Remove Mixed Tabs And Spaces enabled as well as the "show whitespace" feature.
  Love this tip!
  

• @Luke - Being tidy and precise and being productive go hand in hand for me.
  

• You can also use an extension to automatically remove all trailing spaces, like this one:
  https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/76293c4d-8c16-4f4a-aee6-21f83a571496/
  Or this one:
  https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/3a96a4dc-ba9c-4589-92c5-640e07332afd?SRC=VSIDE
  

• Mixed tabs and spaces cause problems when you work with others who may have different tab settings. It can make the code a lot harder to read. Better to be consistent.