Question

I found the following code that will highlight all unnecessary whitespace, but I really want it to also highlight all the tabs in my code. I played around with a lot of variations that didn’t work but I couldn’t find a regex that would do both. Any ideas?

highlight RedundantWhitespace ctermbg=red guibg=red
match RedundantWhitespace /\s\+$\| \+\ze\t/

Edit: adding samples by request:

Okay so in the samples below I am using \t to represent tab and % to represent a trailing whitespace that I want vim to highlight in red.

/tOh hi here is some text%%%%
/t/tHere is some indented text%%%

So on the first line there are 1 tab that should have their spaces highlighted in red and 4 trailing spaces to have highlighted in red. On the second line there are 2 tabs and 3 trailing whitespaces to have highlighted in red.

Answer 1

From your comment on another answer:

No I am looking for it to highlight every tab and all trailing spaces. I am really looking to identify any and all tabs

Does this do what you want?

match RedundantWhitespace /\s\+$\|\t/

In human terms, this is:

Match any spaces at the end of a line, or any tabs anywhere

It seems to select the white space in your examples.