How to stop Vim highlighting trailing whitespace in python files

Question

Title of the question pretty much describes the problem

In my vimrc file i even typed this:

let python_highlight_all = 0

But this does not help at all

UPD: I got it to work with monkeypatch in python.vim. I just commented this line:

syn match   pythonSpaceError    display excludenl "\s\+$"

If someone has a better solution please answer

Answer 1

Here are at least 2 possible reasons for this:

1. python_highlight_all is defined
2. python_space_error_highlight is defined

Since the problem is gone if you monkeypatch syntax/python.vim this highlight should be coming from Vim's default Python syntax file. In the syntax file, the highlight is controlled by the code below:

# vim80/syntax/python.vim
if exists("python_highlight_all")
  ...
  let python_space_error_highlight = 1
endif

With this code, python_space_error_highlight is enabled if a variable python_highlight_all exists regardless of its value. So probably python_highlight_all and/or python_space_error_highlight is defined somewhere.

How's the result if you add the code below to your vimrc?

if exists('python_highlight_all')
    unlet python_highlight_all
endif
if exists('python_space_error_highlight')
    unlet python_space_error_highlight
endif

Answer 2

In $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/python.vim, the pythonSpaceError syntax group is surrounded by an if exists("python_space_error_highlight") conditional (in Vim 8.0; using a syntax file from 2016 Oct 29).

So, there's no need to monkey-patch, you can indeed turn this off, by defining neither python_space_error_highlight nor python_highlight_all (because the latter definition will automatically define the former, too).

(Even when a config value is 0, as the script just tests for the existence of the variable (which is odd and against the usual convention; you may want to complain about this to the script's author). Therefore, ensure that you don't have of those config variables set, and it should work.