What you can't see CAN hurt you (or, at least, annoy you)

Most of the times, and programming in sane (cough, cough)
programming languages, things like whitespaces, tabs and newlines
won't do you much harm. they work as separators for tokens (unless
in a string).

But that doesn't mean that you can't get trapped into some gotchas
related to whitespaces or newlines. One example everyone has dealt
is lineFeed vs carryReturns vs CRLF.

There's a funny article from fxn on O'Reilly site talking about
the secrets and gotchas of newlines.


As a long time vim user, and nearly a year of using emacs (with
different intesities), I care a lot about my editor features, and
one feature that's really useful is the 'select paragraph'. Both
emacs and vim can do this out of the box, but there are some
problems when you aren't careful enough and leave apparently blank
lines that are full of spaces, tabs or any invisible characters.

In vim, you can delete all trailing whitespaces with a simple
regex. Of course, you can create a command to do it for you, or even
map some keybinding to execute %s/\s\+$// , but I'm ok with typing 10 chars for it.

In emacs, of course there's a command for deleting trailing whitespaces, and, guess what?
it's called delete-trailing-whitespaces :) .

If you want emacs to show trailing whitespaces, there's a buffer-local variable called
show-trailing-whitespace that you can set to true. Here's the official emacs doc

Emacs has a command called 'whitespace-cleanup' that bundles some sane (configurable) rules to clean most annoyances related to whitespaces.