Show whitespace characters in gvim

Question

Is there an easy way to display whitespace characters such as space and tab in gvim? Something like what is implemented in Gedit, Geany, Komodo, and other GUI editors where (when the option is turned on) spaces show as a muted or greyed-out '.' and tabs as '-->'.

Solution 1

Check out listchars and list options in Vim. An example use of this feature:

" part of ~/.vimrc
" highlight tabs and trailing spaces
set listchars=tab:>-,trail:-
set list

Solution 2

You can use any characters you wish if you enable Unicode first

set encoding=utf-8

One line I use (put in ~/.vimrc):

set list listchars=tab:→\ ,trail:·

Learn more about this setting at http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Highlight_unwanted_spaces

The color of these characters is controlled by your color scheme.

Solution 3

Here are some of my settings pertaining whitespace.

Use F11 to toggle between displaying whitespace characters or not:

noremap <F11> :set list!<CR>

How to show whitespace characters when list is set:

set listchars=eol:$,tab:>-,trail:.,extends:>,precedes:<,nbsp:_

Highlight special characters in yellow:

highlight SpecialKey term=standout ctermbg=yellow guibg=yellow

Highlight redundant spaces (spaces at the end of the line, spaces before or after tabs):

highlight RedundantSpaces term=standout ctermbg=Grey guibg=#ffddcc    
call matchadd('RedundantSpaces', '\(\s\+$\| \+\ze\t\|\t\zs \+\)\(\%#\)\@!')

Hope these help!

Comments

[memilanuk]

So far I'm using the 'set listchars...' bit from your post and the noremap command from the post by UncleZ... they seem to work well together. Is there a way to get the spaces look like '--->' instead of '>-' with trailing '-'? I tried simply substituting the two strings but that didn't work very well :/

[Marek Sapota]

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible in Vim.

[Ludwig Weinzierl]

@memilanuk: It always confused me that it's '>-------'. If you found a solution, please post it.

[memilanuk]

No such luck. Seems that two of my favorite 'visual' aids - 'show whitespace' and 'indent guides' which most GUI editors or IDEs implement are not doable in vim/gvim as is.

[Shane Reustle]

When adding the last bit, I get: E28: No such highlight group name: RedundantSpaces

[Shane Reustle]

@LudwigWeinzierl The reason it shows ">-------" is because your tabstop (width to display your tab char) is set to 8 (1 arrow, 7 hyphens). Set tabstop=4 and it will be ">---".

[oHo]

Hi @UncleZeiv Please edit your answer in order to swap the two last lines (highlight before matchadd) as you suggested in your last comment. Cheers

[Olivier Dulac]

@memilanuk: you could : set listchars=tab:<->,trail:- # this will mark tabs as: <-> <--> <----> etc. ie, tab: accepts: "ab" or "abc" characters (b being expanded as needed)