How to show spaces as a character in Vim?
As the others have hinted, set list changes non printing characters to a visible character that’s configured in listchars. To explicitly show spaces as some other character, something similar to the below should do the trick: Then just undo the change to go back again. To highlight spaces, just search for it:
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 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:
How to show tabs as characters in listchar?
(Sidenote: listchars can also show trailing spaces with trail:x (replace x with the character you want to use for a trailing space), which can be useful as well.) The basic answer is :set list, which causes tabs to display as ^I.
How to see line breaks in Vim editor?
Or, once Vim is loaded, type :e ++ff=unix. vi shows newlines (LF character, code x0A) by showing the subsequent text on the next line. Use the -b switch for binary mode. For example , vi -b filename or vim -b filename –. It will then show CR characters ( x0D ), which are not normally used in Unix style files, as the characters ^M.
How does Vim remove characters from a file?
Internally when Vim reads a file into its buffer, it replaces all line-ending characters with its own representation (let’s call it $ ‘s). To determine what characters should be removed, it firstly detects in what format line endings are stored in a file.
Is there a way to turn off whitespace in Vim?
I’ll also touch on problems you may run into and how to avoid them. Vim refers to the mode that is used to display whitespace characters as list mode. By default, it’s turned off. To turn it on you can enter set list on the Vim command line or add it to your vimrc file. To turn it off again, you can use the set nolist command.