[vim] Make Vim show ALL white spaces as a character

I can't find a way to make Vim show all white spaces as a character. All I found was about tabs, trailing spaces etc.

all of the answers above try to make spaces visible from within vim. If you really insist on having visible spaces as dots, there's another approach...

If it cannot be done in vim, change your font entirely. I copied the Ubuntu One Mono font and edited it using FontForge. Remember to change the font's fullname, family, preferred family, compatible full (in FontFoge it's under TTF Names in the font info), in order to have it as a separate font. Simply edit the space character to have a dot in the middle and save the font to ~/.fonts Now you can use it for your gvim or the entire terminal... I copied the "!" character, removed the line and moved the dot to the middle. It took a little more than 5 minutes...

Note: changing the space character (0x20) results in the inconvenience of having dots on the entire vim screen... (but it will separate the spaces from tabs...)

As of patch 7.4.710 you can now set a character to show in place of space using listchars!

:set listchars+=space:?

So, to show ALL white space characters as a character you can do the following:

:set listchars=eol:¬,tab:>·,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<,space:?
:set list

Discussion on mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/vim_dev/pjmW6wOZW_Q

As others have said, you could use

:set list

which will, in combination with

:set listchars=...

display invisible characters.
Now, there isn't an explicit option which you can use to show whitespace, but in listchars, you could set a character to show for everything BUT whitespace. For example, mine looks like this

:set listchars=eol:$,tab:>-,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<

so, now, after you use

:set list

everything that isn't explicitly shown as something else, is then, really, a plain old whitespace.

As usual, to understand how listchars works, use the help. It provides great information about what chars can be displayed (like trailing space, for instance) and how to do it:

:help listchars

It might be helpful to add a toggle to it so you can see the changes mid editing easily (source: VIM :set list! as a toggle in .vimrc):

noremap <F5> :set list!<CR>
inoremap <F5> <C-o>:set list!<CR>
cnoremap <F5> <C-c>:set list!<CR>

highlight search

:set hlsearch 

in .vimrc that is

and search for space tabs and carriage returns

/ \|\t\|\r

or search for all whitespace characters

/\s

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)

/\S

to show all trailing white space characters - at the end of the line

/\s$

Adding this to my .vimrc works for me. Just make sure you don't have anything else conflicting..

autocmd VimEnter * :syn match space /\s/
autocmd VimEnter * :hi space ctermbg=lightgray ctermfg=black guibg=lightgray guifg=black

To highlight spaces, just search for it:

/<space>

Notes:

:set list will show all whitespaces as a character. Everything but a space will look different than its normal state, which means that if you still see a plain old space, it's really a plain old space. :)

I didn't find exactly what I wanted from the existing answers. The code below will highlight all trailing spaces bright red. Simply add the following to your .vimrc

highlight ExtraWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red
match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/
autocmd BufWinEnter * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/
autocmd InsertEnter * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+\%#\@<!$/
autocmd InsertLeave * match ExtraWhitespace /\s\+$/
autocmd BufWinLeave * call clearmatches()

I was frustrated with all of the other answers to this question, because none of them highlight the space character in a useful way. Showing spaces as characters would particularly help for whitespace-formatted languages, where mixing tabs and spaces is harmful.

My solution is to show tabs and underline multiple spaces. It borrows from mrucci's answer and this tutorial. Because it uses syntax highlighting, it's persistent:

set list listchars=tab:\|\ 
highlight Whitespace cterm=underline gui=underline ctermbg=NONE guibg=NONE ctermfg=yellow guifg=yellow
autocmd ColorScheme * highlight Whitespace gui=underline ctermbg=NONE guibg=NONE ctermfg=yellow guifg=yellow
match Whitespace /  \+/

Using this, tabs are displayed as | and spaces as _, which makes it very easy to tell when I'm mixing code styles.

The only downside I've found is that this snippet doesn't adjust background color to match the context (like in a comment).

I like using special characters to show whitespace, is more clear. Even a map to toggle is a key feature, for a quick check.

You can find this features in an old vim script not updated since 2004:

vim-scripts/[email protected]

Thanks to project vim-scripts and vundle you can come back to life this plugin

vim-scripts/cream-showinvisibles@github

Even better, my two cents on this is to add a configurable shortcut (instead of predefined F4)

so add this to ~/.vimrc

Plugin 'albfan/cream-invisibles'

let g:creamInvisibleShortCut = "<F5>" "for my F4 goto next error

install plugin on vim

:PluginInstall

and there you go

To cover Unicode whitespace characters:

set list
set listchars=tab:¦\ ,nbsp:·
highlight StrangeWhitespace guibg=Red ctermbg=Red
" The list is from https://stackoverflow.com/a/37903645 (with `\t`, `\n`, ` `, `\xa0` removed):
call matchadd('StrangeWhitespace', '[\x0b\x0c\r\x1c\x1d\x1e\x1f\x85\u1680\u2000\u2001\u2002\u2003\u2004\u2005\u2006\u2007\u2008\u2009\u200a\u2028\u2029\u202f\u205f\u3000]')

The result:

• only the ordinal space (U+0020) looks just like a space ("")
• the tab (U+0009) looks like "¦ " (two characters: a long pipe and then an ordinal space; they are gray in colorscheme murphy)
• the normal non-breaking space (U+00A0) looks like "·" (one character; it's gray in colorscheme murphy)
• any other whitespace character looks like red ""

Depending on your syntax rules for the current buffer, something like this could work:

:syn match WhiteSpace / / containedin=ALL conceal cchar=Æ
:setl conceallevel=2 concealcursor=nv

This needs a vim 7.3 with +conceal feature

Update 10/24/2014 To expand a little bit on that. It is of course possible to define some highlighting for the conealed characters.

• You can configure, how the concealed chars look. For highlighting, you would have to at least once configure the 'Conceal' highlighting group (See the help at :h hl-Conceal This can be done in your colorscheme and then you do not need to reconfigure it again. But this affects all concealed chars (e.g. if your syntax script conceals some more items, they will be displayed as your white space chars). That could look like this:

  :hi Conceal ctermfg=7 ctermbg=NONE guifg=LightGrey guibg=NONE

• 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. The latest one at the time of writing seems to be this one. (This means, you need to built your own Vim to use this).
• The conceallevel and concealcursor are window local options. That means they can be different in different windows (and will possibly be also set by filetype plugins or other plugin scripts).
• The syntax highlighting groups need to be executed whenever a syntax definition file is reloaded. This could be done using a BufWinEnteror possibly also a Syntax or even FileType autocommand. (I have not tested which one actually works).

The last two items means, you would have to setup some autocommands that reset the syntax rules and the correesponding options. For the first one, one might want to setup the highlighting using a ColorScheme autocommand (so that the concealed chars always look the same, independent of what a color scheme actually sets up). For a complete solution, look into romainl answer, that should give you a start. If you setup a function, you can easily setup a toggle command to switch displaying special Highlighting on or off.

Update 10/26/2014 I made a plugin out of this question.

Update 04/22/2015 A patch has been included in Vim that makes this possible using the list option. Simply set set list listchars+=space:? This works as of Vim 7.4.711

If by whitespaces you mean the ' ' character, my suggestion would just be a search/replace. 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:

:%s/ /¦/g

Then just undo the change to go back again.

(to get the ¦ I pressed this exact key sequence: :%s/ /CTRL-KFB/g)

I think other answers here are more comprehensive, but I thought I'd share a trick I usually use to differentiate tabs and spaces visually:

:syntax on
:set syntax=whitespace

These are syntax highlighting rules for the Whitespace programming language - tabs show in green and spaces in red. :)

Can be combined with :set list as mentioned by many other answers, although the tabs will then show as ^I without a green higlight, but the spaces will show in red.

I use this

/\s
:set hlsearch

to highlight white spaces. It searches for all white spaces, and then enables the highlight to make them pop out. However, it does not print a special character.

You could use

:set list

to really see the structure of a line. You will see tabs and newlines explicitly. When you see a blank, it's really a blank.

:set list to enable.

:set nolist to disable.

:se list
:se nolist

:se is enough, :set isn't needed.

:match CursorLine /\s\+/

avoids the "you have to search for spaces to get them to show up" bit but afaict can't be configured to do non-hilighting things to the spaces. CursorLine can be any hilighting group and in the default theme it's a plain underline.

Keep those hacks in the .vimrc as comments, so in the shell, simply :

echo '
  " how-to see the non-visible while spaces
  " :set listchars=eol:¬,tab:>·,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<,space:?
  " set listchars=eol:$,tab:>-,trail:~,extends:>,precedes:<
  " :set list
  " but hei how-to unset the visible tabs ?!
  " :set nolist
  ' >> ~/.vimrc

you can also highlight the spaces (replacing the spaces with a block):

:%s/ /¦/g

(before writing undo it)

If you set:

:highlight Search cterm=underline gui=underline ctermbg=none guibg=none ctermfg=none guifg=none

and then perform a search for a space, every space character will be shown as an underline character.

You can use this command in a handy function that toggles "underscoring" of spaces.

set hls
let g:HLSpace = 1
let g:HLColorScheme = g:colors_name
function ToggleSpaceUnderscoring()
    if g:HLSpace
        highlight Search cterm=underline gui=underline ctermbg=none guibg=none ctermfg=none guifg=none
        let @/ = " "
    else
        highlight clear
        silent colorscheme "".g:HLColorScheme
        let @/ = ""
    endif
    let g:HLSpace = !g:HLSpace
endfunction

Map the function to a shortcut key with:

nmap <silent> <F3> <Esc>:call ToggleSpaceUnderscoring()<CR>

NB: Define the function in vimrc after the colorscheme has been set.

The code below is based on Christian Brabandt's answer and seems to do what the OP wants:

function! Whitespace()
    if !exists('b:ws')
        highlight Conceal ctermbg=NONE ctermfg=240 cterm=NONE guibg=NONE guifg=#585858 gui=NONE
        highlight link Whitespace Conceal
        let b:ws = 1
    endif

    syntax clear Whitespace
    syntax match Whitespace / / containedin=ALL conceal cchar=·
    setlocal conceallevel=2 concealcursor=c
endfunction

augroup Whitespace
    autocmd!
    autocmd BufEnter,WinEnter * call Whitespace()
augroup END

Append those lines to your ~/.vimrc and start a new Vim session to see the still imperfect magic happen.

Feel free to edit the default colors and conceal character.

Caveat: something in the *FuncBody syntax group in several languages prevents the middle dot from showing. I don't know (yet?) how to make that solution more reliable.