" This shows spaces and tabs characters. Visual Whitespace.
set listchars=tab:»·,trail:·
set list
--------
That all work well and good, but I would like to disable this
display of visual white space temporarily, do something, and
then reset it back to what I had. Is there a way to do this?
Well, there are a number of possible solutions. The 'listchars'
setting only allows for showing trailing whitespace. If this is
what you're looking for, you can do something like
set listchars+=trail:_
do your thing, and then
set listchars-=trail:_
to undo it.
If you want to visualize all your whitespace, you can do it with
1) search highlighting (to get cleared on your next search):
:set hls
/\s
and then optionally reset with
:set nohls
or
:noh
2) match highlighting (to optionally be used in complement to
search highlighting):
:match SpellBad /\s/
and then reset with
:match NONE
3) or you can do it by substituting all of your white-space with
some visual character:
:%s/\s/#/g
and then just undoing with "u" as usual.
Just a few ideas...
-tkc
