I have a section of code with 3 empty lines. Empty meaning no tabs and no spaces on them.
I have the following setting in the rules: Empty Lines -> Merge into one.
After I beautify the code, my 3 lines have merged into one, but I have tabs added to this empty line.
When I don't have the "Use tab character" set, then the merged line has redundant spaces.
Beautifier should remove all whitespace from empty (blank) lines and should not add such when merging empty lines.

I have added this to the list of enhancement requests.

[quote]Beautifier should remove all whitespace from empty (blank) lines and should not add such when merging empty lines.[/quote]

Agreed. Cleaning up stray whitespace is one of the reasons for running the Beautifier.

I would also like to see all options that result in tab characters in source code being permanently removed, as they can only do harm. I think this would be a significant improvement.

I consider this a BUG and not an enhancement request. Because the beautifier adds whitespace characters where originally there were none.

I assume this is the left margin of the code?

Exactly

UPDATE:
I just noticed a pattern: the quantity of whitespace entered on empty lines is equal to the number of indentations on the line just above it minus one.
So if the above line is indented 3 times with 3 tabs, the following line would have 2 tabs.
Or if spaces are used and the indentation is set to 4 spaces, then the line with the code has 12 spaces and the "empty" line has 8.

This is the most important bug for us. Because if we beatify all of our code now, when you fix this (later) a subsequent beatify command will introduce a lot of changed lines in our version control.

Any update one year later? This is really bugging with our Git.
PLEASE!!!

We have the same problem with the beautifier rules. Could this be fixed please?

It's 2024, ver.15 and we still have this bug!?