Overview

Teach Emacs whitespace-mode about fancy characters.

• Quickstart
• Explanation
• Compatibility and Requirements

Quickstart

(require 'unicode-whitespace)
 
(unicode-whitespace-setup 'subdued-faces)
 
;; execute M-x whitespace-mode RET

Explanation

Unicode-whitespace makes the built-in whitespace-mode Unicode-aware in two different ways:

1. Recognizing Unicode whitespace characters in your buffer, such as "No-Break Space" or "Hair Space".

2. Displaying Unicode characters such as "Paragraph Sign" (¶) in place of whitespace.

This library also makes some minor adjustments to the default settings of whitespace-mode, and exposes character-by-character display substitution mappings in customize.

To use unicode-whitespace, place the unicode-whitespace.el library somewhere Emacs can find it, and add the following to your ~/.emacs file:

(require 'unicode-whitespace)
(unicode-whitespace-setup 'subdued-faces)  ; 'subdued-faces is optional

Then invoke whitespace-mode as usual.

The display of newlines is changed from the default. Newline indicators are not displayed unless one of the following conditions is met:

1. truncate-lines is non-nil

2. word-wrap is non-nil

3. The major mode of the buffer is listed in unicode-whitespace-newline-mark-modes.

A new whitespace-style is provided: 'echo causes the name of the whitespace character under the point to be displayed in the echo area. This is not enabled by default.

Two interactive commands are provided to manipulate these settings when whitespace-mode is active:

unicode-whitespace-toggle-newlines
unicode-whitespace-toggle-echo

Compatibility and Requirements

GNU Emacs version 24.4-devel     : yes, at the time of writing
GNU Emacs version 24.3           : yes
GNU Emacs version 23.3           : yes
GNU Emacs version 22.3 and lower : no

Requires ucs-utils.el

Uses if present: unicode-fonts.el