Question

Is there an easy way to display whitespace characters such as space and tab in gvim? Something like what is implemented in Gedit, Geany, Komodo, and other GUI editors where (when the option is turned on) spaces show as a muted or greyed-out ‘.’ and tabs as ‘–>’.

Answer 1

Check out listchars and list options in Vim. An example use of this feature:

" part of ~/.vimrc
" highlight tabs and trailing spaces
set listchars=tab:>-,trail:-
set list