Make Vim show ALL white spaces as a character

vim whitespace vi hidden-characters
Matt picture Matt · Nov 4, 2009 · Viewed 659k times · Source

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.

Answer

Rook picture Rook · Nov 4, 2009

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>

Related questions

Tab key == 4 spaces and auto-indent after curly braces in Vim

How do I make vi-Vim never use tabs (converting spaces to tabs, bad!), makes the tab key == 4 spaces, and automatically indent code after curly brace blocks like Emacs does? Also, how do I save these settings so I never have …

Read More
How can you automatically remove trailing whitespace in vim

I am getting 'trailing whitespace' errors trying to commit some files in git. I want to remove these trailing whitespace characters automatically right before I save python files. Can you configure vim to do this? If so, how?

Read More
Setting Vim whitespace preferences by filetype

At my work, I am required to follow the house style for indentation, which goes as follows: 2 spaces when coding html and ruby tabs when coding javascript, with tabwidth=4 recommended What is the best way to specify different whitespace preferences …

Read More