From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Harry Putnam Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: How to show all characters in a specific line Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 20:46:22 -0500 Organization: Still searching... 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X-Received-From: 80.91.229.3 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:101818 Archived-At: Drew Adams writes: >> In vi/vim on any line and in Command mode if you press :l you >> will see any \t, newline and etc. > > If you are talking only about whitespace chars then you can use > `whitespace-mode' to show them highlighted in various ways or > contexts. See the Emacs manual, node `Useless Whitespace' for more > information. > > You can also use library `highlight-chars.el' to do this. It lets you > highlight any characters pretty much any way you like. It is available > from MELPA or Emacs Wiki (the wiki is down at the moment, however). Thanks for the good useful input. `whitespace-mode' seems to do all I wanted and compared to `highlight-chars', it is much more readable since it doesn't just put a fairly opaque blob of color where a tab is used. (I realize the face is customizable... but by default its fairly blotto looking to read) `whitespace-mode' puts an icon of sorts: >> but smaller, for tab and . for space. All on a background color of a medium dark grey. Mush easier on the eyes and easier to ascertain immediately what has been put down. But still (And no religious scrap intended) neither of those is really as readable and handy as vim's :l Which puts only an icon in the place of \t (^I). It collapses the whitespace and puts a series of ^I for however many \t were used. I don't think a snippet of whitespace-mode or hightlight-chars will survive mail incoding without creating some kind of image of it, but the vim look is just common keyboard characters with no higlight: This: rsync_short_args -avlR rsync_long_args --stats --delete --numeric-ids --delete-excluded Becomes: rsync_short_args^I-avlR$ rsync_long_args^I--stats^I--delete^I--numeric-ids^I--delete-excluded$ Plus by default it does not process the whole buffer. Just the current line or more if selected. Its just the rest of vim is not my favorite; so whitespace-mode looks like the winner. Thanks again