How do I turn off the unlimited whitespace in IntelliJ editor?

Solution 1:

File menu -> Settings -> Editor -> General -> Virtual Space and uncheck 'Allow placement of caret after end of line' . You may also uncheck the other options in the Virtual Space panel.

Solution 2:

If the other answers don't seem to be working, you might have Column Selection Mode enabled. On my Mac it's mapped to Cmd+Shift+8. It's located under the Edit menu. That menu item will show a little checkmark when the mode is enabled.

Solution 3:

To get the expected behavior where indentations are respected when you click on a line :

In Preferences > Editor > Virtual Space

Check :

Allow placement of caret inside tabs.

Uncheck :

Allow placement of caret after end of line.

This was really annoying to me and makes very little sense as a default behavior to me.

Solution 4:

Note that for Intellij IDEA 11 for mac, settings are placed under the IntelliJ IDEA menu and called preferences. (Maybe some sort of mac default ?)

Solution 5:

What Matt_Bro said (first answer), but if you've already got the box unchecked in preferences, try re-checking it (I checked all the virtual space boxes) and restarting. Then uncheck and hit apply--at this point unlimited space was disabled for me.