Sublime Text 2: how to change white space characters color?

Question

The color seems to be linked to the foreground in themes. I assume it\'s using less alpha. Is there a way to control this?

Answer 1

A few years later, I was struggling with this in Sublime Text 3 build 3083. I hope this helps anyone. In addition to Chris Like's suggestion to install PersistentRegexHighlight and setting "draw_white_space": "all" in the user preferences and the pattern to one or more occurances of tabs and spaces, i.e. [ \t]+ in the PersistentRegexHighlight user settings, i had to also also set "color_scope": "highlight.whitespace" and add the following dict to the theme along with the other ones in the settings array:

  name
  highlight.whitespace
  scope
  highlight.whitespace
  settings
  
    background
    #020202
    foreground
    #805050
  

which by the way oddly only outlines in red if the background is set to black, i.e #000000

Note that this method does not require editing any syntax files.