Sublime Text 2 - View whitespace characters

Question

How can Sublime Text show non printable characters (I\'m interested in SPACEs and TABs)?

Answer 1

In selected text, SPACE is shown as dot (.) and TAB as a dash (-).

Answer 2

If you really only want to see trailing spaces, this ST2 plugin will do the trick: https://github.com/SublimeText/TrailingSpaces

Answer 3

I know this is an old thread, but I like my own plugin that can cycle through whitespace modes (none, selection, and all) via a single shortcut. It also provides menu items under a View | Whitespace menu.

Hopefully people will find this useful - it is used by a lot of people :)

Answer 4

To view whitespace the setting is:

// Set to "none" to turn off drawing white space, "selection" to draw only the
// white space within the selection, and "all" to draw all white space
"draw_white_space": "selection",

You can see it if you go into Preferences->Settings Default. If you edit your user settings (Preferences->Settings - User) and add the line as per below, you should get what you want:

{
    "color_scheme": "Packages/Color Scheme - Default/Slush & Poppies.tmTheme",
    "font_size": 10,
    "draw_white_space": "all"
}

Remember the settings are JSON so no trailing commas.

Answer 5

I've several plugins (including Unicode Character Highlighter), but the only one which found the character that was hiding from me today was Highlighter.

You can test to see if it's working by pasting in the text from the readme.

For reference, the character causing me trouble was 
.

For a sanity check, tap your right arrow key over a range of text containing an invisible character, and you'll need to right-arrow twice to move past the character.

I'm also using the following custom regex string (which I don't fully grok):

{
    // there's an extra range in use [^\\x00-\\x7F]
    // also, don't highlight spaces at the end of the line (my settings take care of that)
    "highlighter_regex": "(\t+ +)|( +\t+)|[^\\x00-\\x7F]|[\u2026\u2018\u2019\u201c\u201d\u2013\u2014]"
}

Answer 6

A "quick and dirty" way is to use the find function and activate regular expressions.

Then just search for : \s for highlighting spaces \t for tabs \n for new-lines etc.