Eclipse – How to Hide Whitespace Characters

I assume your questions is with regards to Java code. If that's the case, you don't actually need any extra plugins to accomplish 1). You can just go to Preferences -> Java -> Editor -> Save Actions and configure it to remove trailing whitespace.

By the sounds of it you also want to make this a team-wide setting, right? To make life easier and avoid having to remember setting it up every time you have a new workspace you can set the save action as a project specific preference that gets stored into your SCM along with the code.

In order to do that right-click on your project and go to Properties -> Java Editor -> Save Actions. From there you can enable project specific settings and configure it to remove trailing whitespace (among other useful things).

NB: This option has been removed in Eclipse Kepler (4.3) and following releases.

NB #2: The option seems to be back in Eclipse Luna - Luna Service Release 1a (4.4.1)

If you have Eclipse 3.7 you can disable them.

Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors -- Look for 'Show whitespace characters' and click on the link 'whitespace characters'.