Learn Vim at your own pace with my self-study Core Vim Course.

Learn more

Learn Vim at your own pace with my self-study Core Vim Course.

Learn more

Show invisibles

#1

Run time:

Vim’s list feature can be used to reveal hidden characters, such as tabstops and newlines. In this episode, I demonstrate how to customise the appearance of these characters by tweaking the listchars setting. I go on to show how to make these invisible characters blend in with your colortheme.

Shownotes

Put the following in your .vimrc file:

" Shortcut to rapidly toggle `set list`
nmap <leader>l :set list!<CR>

" Use the same symbols as TextMate for tabstops and EOLs
set listchars=tab:▸\ ,eol:¬

If you like, you can customise other invisible characters besides tabs and end-of-lines. For more information, run :help listchars.

You can customise the syntax highlighting colours of invisible characters with the NonText and SpecialKey keywords. In my prefered colourtheme, I have added the following lines:

"Invisible character colors 
highlight NonText guifg=#4a4a59
highlight SpecialKey guifg=#4a4a59

Unicode characters can be inserted by typing ctrl-vu followed by the 4 digit hexadecimal code.

Symbol Unicode Name
¬ U+00AC not sign
▸ U+25B8 black right-pointing small triangle
☠ U+2620 skull and crossbones
❤ U+2764 heavy black heart
‽ U+203d interobang

Further reading

Comments

Browse similar content

Level-up your Vim

Training

Boost your productivity with a Vim training class. Join a public class, or book a private session for your team.

Drew hosted a private Vim session for the shopify team that was one of the best workshops I have ever attended.

John Duff, Director of Engineering at Shopify

Publications

Make yourself a faster and more efficient developer with the help of these publications, including Practical Vim (Pragmatic Bookshelf 2012), which has over 50 five-star reviews on Amazon.

After reading it, I've switched to vim as my default editor on a daily basis with no regrets. ★★★★★

Javier Collado

Learn to use Vim efficiently in your Ruby projects

In association with thoughtbot, one of the most well respected Rails consultancies in the world, I've produced a series of screencasts on how to make navigating your Ruby projects with Vim ultra-efficient. Along the way, you’ll also learn how to make Ruby blocks a first-class text object in Vim. This lets you edit Ruby code at a higher level of abstraction. Available to buy from thoughtbot..

Vimcasts.org established MMX