Re: newline-and-indent vs. electric-indent-mode

[martin rudalics]

>>> The problem with `whitespace-cleanup-mode` is that it's global.
>>> I'd like something that only operates locally, i.e. only touches lines
>>> you've modified.
>> That would be https://github.com/lewang/ws-butler.
>
> That's better, indeed, tho if you look at the implementation you see
> that it has to deal with lots of corner cases, so it ends up "ugly and
> brittle":

It's the best you can get I would say.  You can't really postpone
trimming to 'kill-buffer' and anything before 'save-buffer' can be just
too early.  Yet, saving will irrevocably trim all whitespace so you
can't get it back for future editing.

> I'm not sure "cleanup on save" is the better option.
> I don't mean to say that Le Wang did a bad job, BTW: the issues aren't
> caused by a bad design or implementation, but by a hard problem.
>
> I was thinking instead of something that removes the trailing space(s)
> when point leaves the line (like Madhu suggested).  Of course that's
> also fraught with danger (e.g. you don't want that whitespace to
> disappear just because you did `C-x C-x`), so the result might end up
> just as ugly&brittle.

We could put some phantom space there and restore it as soon as point
reenters that line.  And maybe handle the current line specially when
saving the buffer.

martin