It’s so helpful to get to the last “real” position in a line either with the back key or with clicking the mouse right of it, I found lots of useless trailing whitespace this way (before I used an editor that even marked trailing whitespace) and it’s quite helpful when editing and you want to jump to the end of a line.

and we could be even more strict: remove trailing whitespace on save by default !

(Though I have to wonder if Ben has a blog entry somewhere, where all the comments say “definitely strictlines off!” :-)

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You have your cursor at the end of the third line, after the 5. You press up, so the cursor ends up at the end of the 3. (For the record, it would bug me a lot if it ended up two spaces after the 3; I hadn’t even thought of *that* problem with strictlines off.) Now, you press up again. Some editors would put you after the 3 in the first line. Vim, on the other hand, will put you after the 5 in the first line, because it remembered your position in the line even if your cursor position remains to the left of that due to a short line. However, if you moved up, left, up, you’d end up after the 2 in the first line. I find this behavior very intuitive when using up or down to move across many lines; without it, moving past an empty line will put your cursor at the beginning of the line.

If my cursor is in the middle of a line of text, and I press up to go to the blank line above it, then I want it to behave consistently. With strictlines on it would sometimes move to the left (no white space on the line) but sometimes it would stay in the same place.

I see strict lines a bit like the ’show non-printable characters’ option – most people aren’t that bothered what the characters are, so they hide them to give a simplier / cleaner interface. Likewise, most of the time I don’t care if there is trailing space or a line full of white space in a file, so why should it make my editor behave differently?