Dymola, whitespace and version control

Question

I opened a Modelica library in Dymola, changed one line, closed Dymola and clicked "Save all", now TortoiseSVN is showing several hundred changed files instead of just one file with the one line changed I intended to do. All these changes are either whitespace, or line breaks, introduced by Dymola it seems.

Of course I can now be careful to only commit the file I have changed (and revert the rest), but that makes committing more time-consuming and error-prone than it needs to be. Or I can just commit it all, but that makes it hard for my colleagues to review the change. Also, it feels like it is not deterministic, so a later commit might just revert parts back. I sometimes even revert all changes, then use a text editor to change just the one line. All this makes version control unnecessarily complicated.

When I look at the commits and diffs for e.g. the Modelica Standard library:
https://github.com/modelica/ModelicaStandardLibrary/commits/master
The diffs are nice and small and readable usually. Is there a trick to avoid the whitespace issue?
How I can I turn off all autoformatting by Dymola? Is there a technical reason to do it in the first place?

Answer 1

There are some things you can do to make pretty git commits for Modelica code:

1. Use a text editor instead of a graphical editor. You have absolute control of what you change.
2. Use a graphical editor that does not change whitespace. I'm not sure of other alternatives, but OpenModelica/OMEdit will preserve existing indentation as much as possible (it can also be used to minimize diffs from changes in other tools, but it works less and less well the more changes there are).
3. Use a formatter as a pre-commit hook (indenting all files according to some settings in the formatter; but then you can't manually change whitespace).
4. Hope someone on stackoverflow has more alternatives than this.