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How do you highlight a space in vim?
Using the list and listchars options. The command :set list displays whitespace, while :set nolist displays normally. It is convenient to use :set list! to toggle the option on, so that you can later press : followed by the up arrow to repeat the previous command, to toggle ‘list’ off.
How do I change a Tab to a space in Vim?
Adjusting indent To easily change a tab-based indent to use spaces instead when ‘noexpandtab’ is set, you can temporarily set ‘expandtab’ and use :retab with a range. For example, to convert only the current line to use spaces, use :. retab .
How do I Retab in Vim?
Vim provides ! retab command which will replace all sequences of with new strings of white-space using the new tabstop (e.g. :set tabstop=2 ) value given, but all tabs inside of strings can be modified (e.g. in a C program, you should use \t to avoid this)!
Do you see all whitespace characters in Vim?
You will see tabs and newlines explicitly. When you see a blank, it’s really a blank. of search for all non white space characters (the whitespace characters are not shown, so you see the whitespace characters between words, but not the trailing whitespace characters)
Why does VIM not highlight spaces in List mode?
There seems to be a particularity that Vim will not highlight spaces, if the syntax script uses the skipwhite keyword. There will be no way around (perhaps this will be fixed, I posted a patch) There seems to be a patch floating around, that will allow to customize how spaces will look in list mode.
How to make Vim show tabs as characters?
I can also toggle tab’s marks. By providing two escaped spaces in front of your tab declaration, vim will repeat the spaces. This is opposed to the default, where vim prefers the second character as the repeating character. This achieves a similar effect to using a plugin like IndentLine without the overhead.
How to highlight tabs in a vimrc document?
These characters are distinctive enough that they rarely appear literally in document text. To type these special characters into your vimrc, type Ctrl-v u 23CE while in Insert Mode, as explained in :help utf-8-typing. For occasional use, one can simply highlight all tabs in a document using the following search / command: