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Featured tip for October view archive

Programmers, and other careful editors, often work hard to maintain consistent use of whitespace characters (space and tab). Perhaps you want to avoid using spaces before tabs or at the end of a line. Or, you may want to see where tabs occur, or see only the tabs that are not used for indenting.

Good news! There are several ways to highlight unwanted whitespace. Try a simple search, or match or syntax highlighting. There's also the 'list' option, and your filetype may support showing syntax space errors.

See Featured Tips for more, or to nominate a featured tip.

Did you know? view archive

• Vim 7.2 has been released
• Mappings with expand("%:p:h") help working with files in the same directory.
• When searching, \n is newline, \r is CR, but when replacing, \r is newline, \n is a null byte.
• You can set, clear, invert, display, and restore a boolean option to its default.
• Press . to repeat the last change.
• With the right commands, you can swap characters, words and lines.
• There are many settings for working with Unicode, and handling BOM markers.
• A modeline can configure options for a particular file.
• A mapping can jump to where a Perl function is defined (without tags).
• You can fold sequences of two or more blank lines.
• You can list lines containing a keyword and prompt to jump to a line.

From Vim Help view archive

• Use :match ErrorMsg /sample/ to highlight every "sample". :help :match
• Or do the same with :call matchadd('ErrorMsg', 'sample') then :call clearmatches(). :help matchadd()
• Use :hi ErrorMsg to see the ErrorMsg highlight definition. :help :highlight

Other pages

• Vim documentation
• Notes on the import of tips from vim.org
• Using Vim to edit tips