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A long while back I transitioned to doing all my web application development in Eclipse from BBEdit. But I miss one little feature from BBEdit. I used to be able to show invisible characters like tabs but not show other invisibles like spaces. I know that I can bulk turn all of these on in Eclipse, but I wonder if there is a way to show only some invisibles in Eclipse.

tshepang
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bryan kennedy
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    Incase anyone in the future lands on this page like I did looking for how to show white space in eclipse it is: Window>Preferences>General>Editors>Text Editors – JD Isaacks Jan 15 '10 at 21:58
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    Update: Eclipse has this ability from 3.7M3 version. You can adjust the visibility of space, tab, cr and lf individually. – Csaba_H Nov 02 '10 at 08:42

5 Answers5

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Unfortunately, you can only turn on all invisible (whitespace) characters at the same time. I suggest you file an enhancement request but I doubt they will pick it up.

The text component in Eclipse is very complicated as it is and they are not keen on making them even worse.

[UPDATE] This has been fixed in Eclipse 3.7: Go to Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors

Click on the link "whitespace characters" to fine tune what should be shown.

Kudos go to John Isaacks

Community
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Aaron Digulla
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    Thanks for the tip. It's nice to know that this is probably a fixed issue. I will go ahead and search out the Eclipse issue system and file a request. – bryan kennedy Dec 12 '08 at 23:05
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    Now that Eclipse Indigo is out, this answer is no longer accurate. See John's comment on the original question. – MatrixFrog Jun 24 '11 at 00:30
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Navigate to Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors

Click on the CheckBox "Show whitespace characters".

enter image description here

Thats all.!!!

ks1322
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Sireesh Yarlagadda
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I would prefer to keep the "Show Whitespace" button on the toolbar, so that in one click you can toggle it.

Go to Window -> Perspective -> Customize Perspective and enable to show the button on toolbar.

enter image description here

Vishal John
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    Exactly what I wanted. I even tried to search for 'word wrap' in context menu but couldn't find it in Neon. This helped a lot. Thanks. – Shiyaz Apr 18 '17 at 13:13
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I use Checkstlye plugin for such a purpose. In Checkstyle configuration, I add special regexp rules to detect lines with TABs and then mark such lines as checkstyle ERROR, which is clearly visible in Eclipse editor. Works fine.

Vladimir Sizikov
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AnyEdit Scroll all the way down: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/anyedit/examples.html

Guillaume Massé
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