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

You may want to try installing PersistentRegexHighlight from Package Control and then use a blank-character regex like [\x20 ] to add a specific color or color scope.

You'd want to combine this with drawWhiteSpace: "all", in Sublime user prefs.

Answer 2

There's now a Sublime plugin for this.

1. Install the HighlightWhitespaces plugin

2. Add the following color settings (tailored to your preference) to your color_scheme file. This file ends in .tmTheme and the path can be found by looking at the value for the key "color_scheme" in your settings file.

   <dict>
     <key>name</key>
     <string>highlight.whitespace</string>
     <key>scope</key>
     <string>highlight.whitespace</string>
     <key>settings</key>
     <dict>
       <key>background</key>
       <string>#020202</string>
       <key>foreground</key>
       <string>#805050</string>
     </dict>
   </dict>
   

3. Specify that this color should be used by adding the following to the user settings of the HighlightWhitespaces plugin:

   {
       "highlight_whitespaces_space_highlight_scope_name": "highlight.whitespace",
       "highlight_whitespaces_tab_highlight_scope_name": "highlight.whitespace",
       "highlight_whitespaces_eol_highlight_scope_name": "highlight.whitespace",
       "highlight_whitespaces_mixed_highlight_scope_name": "highlight.whitespace"
   }
   

4. Relax and enjoy :-)

Answer 3

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:

<dict>
  <key>name</key>
  <string>highlight.whitespace</string>
  <key>scope</key>
  <string>highlight.whitespace</string>
  <key>settings</key>
  <dict>
    <key>background</key>
    <string>#020202</string>
    <key>foreground</key>
    <string>#805050</string>
  </dict>
</dict>

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.

Answer 4

You can change the tab underline alpha by changing the foreground alpha.

To change the color of spaces requires changes to every syntax file.