How do I make Emacs show blank spaces?

Question

How can I make Emacs show blank spaces (like a space, a tab, a line-jump, etc). Many other editors like Kate and Eclipse have this feature and I find it very useful to see when

Answer 1

indent-broken? - never use tabs in your code - disk space is cheap these days.

Put (setq-default indent-tabs-mode nil) in your .emacs file. Get used to typing C-x h M-x untabify to untabify the entire buffer. To search for tabs type C-s C-i. If you have obscure control characters in your buffers you can see them with M-x hexl-mode.

Also C-x h M-x indent-region will indent the entire buffer. Some modes like vhdl-mode have a beautify region command.