How to stop intellij-idea from removing white spaces at end of text lines in my file? - intellij-idea

Question

I am using 2018.1.5 community edition of intellij editor to edit a plain text file.
I am not using a project. I start it, on Linux as follows:
idea.sh my_file.mpl
where my_file.mpl is plain text file.
And this works well, except for one big problem.
I need to have an empty space at end of some lines. i.e. after the line character on some line in the file, I insert some white. I see the space is there, by doing View->Active editor->Show White spaces. I can see the small tiny dotts, showing there are white space character at end of line.
But as soon as I save the file, these white spaces are removed from end of line.
This causes a problem for me (for other reason, when this file is read by another app).
Is there an option to tell it intellij NOT to remove white spaces after the last character on the line?

Answer 1

Go to File->Settings->Editor->General and under Other, set the drop down next to Strip trailing spaces on Save to whatever you wish. For future reference, you can press Ctrl-Shift-A and type a search term to find any menu command or setting very quickly. In this case, "trailing spaces" or "strip trailing spaces" works really well.

Answer 2

Newer PyCharm (2020 and beyond) have slightly different answer than Code-Apprentice's.
Go to File->Settings->Editor->General, and then scroll down to Save Files section. The drop down Strip trailing spaces on Save for: is there. You can select None if you don't want any stripping in no circumstances.
Here is an image showing the setting:

Answer 3

If changing the settings in "Editor > General > Save Files" doesn't work, the below might be useful...
There is a discussion here about a possible bug (or at least confusing scenario) where you have set "Strip trailing spaces on Save for"=None and you still get stripping of trailing spaces, as I did. The comment by Oksana Chumak worked for me - namely, I unticked "Enable EditorConfig Support" in Settings > Editor > Code Style. This seems to allow a config file ".editorconfig" to be used which overrides some settings - also see Andriy Bazanov's answer, quoted below...
NOTE: If you have .editorconfig file in your project, such option can
also be controlled via that file. This file can provide more granular
control over what files are affected by those settings.
Settings from .editorconfig file will OVERWRITE IDE settings (the
whole nature of such files), so if you have such files in your project
and such instruction there, you will have to either disable the
EditorConfig for this project or disable plugin completely (if you do
not care about it at all).

Answer 4

I had my .editorconfig and I have used trim_trailing_whitespace=true. So that was the issue. This is what I did to fix the issue.
[*.md]
trim_trailing_whitespace=false

Answer 5

So here's what worked for me. I wanted intellij to keep trimming whitespaces but to keep the whitespace on blank lines.
First like #Michael-Veksler suggested, I changed intellij's default removal on save.
But it kept trimming the trailing whitespace, that was because in my .editorconfig file I had a trim_trailing_whitespace config turned on. So now I've set trim_trailing_whitespace = false.
Lastly, because I still wanted the editor to trim the trailing whitespaces, just not on blank lines I've added to my .eslintrc.js file the following setting:
module.exports = {
...
rules: {
...
'no-trailing-spaces': [2, { "skipBlankLines": true }]
}
}
And now lint-fix on save just takes care of it