How do I make Emacs show blank spaces?

emacs whitespace
pupeno picture pupeno · Nov 16, 2008 · Viewed 38.5k times · Source

How can I make Emacs show blank spaces (like a space, a tab, a line-jump, etc). Many other editors like Kate and Eclipse have this feature and I find it very useful to see when code is indent-broken because of mix of spaces and tabs (particularly Python).

Answer

Justin Tanner picture Justin Tanner · Nov 16, 2008

WhiteSpace mode is an Emacs minor mode for visualizing all white space characters in the current buffer. It can be activated with M-x whitespace-mode.

Here is a screenshot of WhiteSpace in action taken directly from the Emacs wiki,

whitespace mode in action

Note: WhiteSpaceMode has now replaced BlankMode

Related questions

Emacs Command to Delete Up to Non-Whitespace Character

I often want to make a multiline function call and reduce it down to one line. For example, convert... function_call( 'first_arg', 'second') to function_call('first_arg', 'second') Does emacs have some commands to help with this. Specifically, …

Read More
How do I make Git use the editor of my choice for commits?

I would prefer to write my commit messages in Vim, but it is opening them in Emacs. How do I configure Git to always use Vim? Note that I want to do this globally, not just for a single project.

Read More
Differences between Emacs and Vim

Without getting into a religious argument about why one is better than the other, what are the practical differences between Emacs and Vim? I'm looking to learn one or the other, but I realize the learning curve for each is …

Read More