I am in the unfortunate position of working on a code-base which already contains bits of (erroneous) trailing white space. To avoid spurious changes in my patches I need to have trim_trailing_white_space_on_save turned off. However, the setting seems to be ignored, which leaves me with a bunch of whitespace changes that I have to exclude from commits.

My Default/Preferences.sublime-settings contains:

    "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": false,

My User/Preferences.sublime-settings does not mention this setting.
My project specific file contains:

"settings": { "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": false, "ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true }

Can anyone suggest what I’m missing? Is there some other setting that has a similar effect? Or perhaps a package that may be interfering? Or is this just a bug?

Found it. Turns out I’d created a syntax specific configuration for C++ that turned whitespace trimming on.

You can use diff -db to prevent whitespace from showing in the diff. Not sure if that is allowed where you work though.

Thanks. The diff display is not the problem though, the problem is the commit: If the commit contains spurious lines then it increases the chance of causing a merge conflict later on.

Over time we will (I hope) gradually eliminate these whitespace problems, but it’ll probably require a bit of coordination to do it without irritating people.