Any way to remove trailing whitespace *FOR EDITED* lines in Eclipse [for Java]?

Question

Removing trailing white space for all lines has already been answered: How to auto-remove trailing whitespace in Eclipse?

However, I haven't been able to try to find a way to do so for only the lines that I edited.

Please don't mark this as duplicate of the above because the answer is not in the above and the question is now 5 years old and kinda forgotten about.

The reason is that I want to maintain my commits clean, so that you can see which lines I actually edited. Otherwise there is a big mess and you can't tell what I've done. I would then deal with remaining trailing whitespace in other commits.

Has anyone been able to do this?

Things tried:

AnyEdit

Only has option to remove all lines

Eclipse -> Save actions > * > 'remove trailing white spaces on all lines'

Removes on all lines.

Eclipse ctrl+3 -> remove white space

Removes on all lines.

Citronella

step1: remove trailing whitespace for all the codebase, step2: commit that, then you can remove them normally, AFAIK there's no other way (or you'll have to write your own plugin) – Gerundive

Hmmm, it seems that way :-/. – Citronella

Patch to change 2708 lines from our code base ^_^: git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/39216 – Citronella

It would either need to work on save and just trim the lines that had been altered. Or could integrate with your version control system and apply the trim to the edited lines before committing. It's a nice idea though. I've previously had to resort to what @RC. suggested, or at least doing it on a file by file basis. – Tool

Thank you for the suggestion. We put the project settings into the git repo and now force everyone to clear whitespaces. – Citronella

Answer 1

Enable on save formatting for edited lines only: SaveActions>Perform the selected actions on save>Format source code>Format edited lines. Tested it with this settings:

With this settings whitespaces have been removed only for edited lines. There is no option to remove trailing white spaces in formatter settings so I guess it is doing that by default.

I tested it with Eclipse 4.3.2 (Kepler SR2)

Context

Funny, I posted this question when I was an intern. In the mean time I'm actually an Eclipse contributor. Thanks for answering. – Citronella

This does not really answer the original question. Formatting does many other things, besides removing whitespace. – Springs