Make Vim show ALL white spaces as a character

Question

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

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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

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you can also highlight the spaces  replacing the spaces with a block      s      g    before writing undo it

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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

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Depending on your syntax rules for the current buffer  something like this could work    syn match WhiteSpace     containedin ALL conceal cchar     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

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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

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se list  se nolist    se is enough   set isn t needed

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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

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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

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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  gt    trail   extends  gt  precedes  lt  space    set list   Discussion on mailing list  https   groups google com forum  fromgroups  topic vim dev pjmW6wOZW Q

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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  gt - trail   extends  gt  precedes  lt    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  lt F5 gt   set list  lt CR gt  inoremap  lt F5 gt   lt C-o gt  set list  lt CR gt  cnoremap  lt F5 gt   lt C-c gt  set list  lt CR gt

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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

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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

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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

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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        lt     autocmd InsertLeave   match ExtraWhitespace   s     autocmd BufWinLeave   call clearmatches

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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

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To highlight spaces  just search for it     lt space gt   Notes    lt space gt  means just type the space character  Enable highlighting of search results with  set hlsearch  To highlight spaces  amp  tabs     lt space gt  lt tab gt    A quick way to remove the highlights is to search for anything else   asdf   just type any short list of random characters

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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  gt    trail   extends  gt  precedes  lt  space       set listchars eol   tab  gt - trail   extends  gt  precedes  lt       set list     but hei how-to unset the visible tabs         set nolist      gt  gt     vimrc

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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

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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 cream-showinvisibles vim org  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     lt F5 gt    for my F4 goto next error   install plugin on vim   PluginInstall   and there you go

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set list to enable    set nolist to disable

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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

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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

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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  lt silent gt   lt F3 gt   lt Esc gt  call ToggleSpaceUnderscoring   lt CR gt    NB  Define the function in vimrc after the colorscheme has been set

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

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