Reputation: 26919

Show space, tab, CRLF characters in editor of Visual Studio

Where are the settings to show a space, tab, paragraph, CRLF, etc. (extended) characters?

Upvotes: 365

Answers (12)

Paiman Roointan

Reputation: 574

For Visual Studio for Mac, you can find it under Visual Studio -> Preferences -> Text Editor -> Markers and Rulers -> Show invisible characters

Visual Studio for Mac 2019
You may need to restart Visual Studio for the changes to take effect.

Visual Studio for Mac 2022
You can enable this feature only for selected text, or always, and choose to show line endings, spaces and/or tabs. Changes will take effect immediately.

Upvotes: 2

Cerveser

Reputation: 860

If you use Visual Studio Code => View => Render Whitespace That's it! For me this setting was on, but didn't work. I had to turn it off and on again and than it worked! So this is a bug in Visual Studio Code!

If you use Visual Studio 2022 you can change the display options for whitespace etc. in Tools => Options => Text Editor => General and select "View whitespace"

Upvotes: 4

Isaac

Reputation: 344

For completeness since I haven't seen it mentioned here, it is also in Options->Text Editor->General->View Whitespace.

Upvotes: 1

Pavel Yermalovich

Reputation: 2000

Edit -> Advanced -> View White Space or Ctrl+R,Ctrl+W for Visual Studio 2019

Upvotes: 159

freesh

Reputation: 199

In the actual version this Option ist under Editor: Render Whitespace

Upvotes: 0

Fourth

Reputation: 9351

Edit > Advanced > View White Space. The keyboard shortcut is CTRL+R, CTRL+W. The command is called Edit.ViewWhiteSpace.

It works in all Visual Studio versions at least since Visual Studio 2010, the current one being Visual Studio 2019 (at time of writing). In Visual Studio 2013, you can also use CTRL+E, S or CTRL+E, CTRL+S.

By default, end of line markers are not visualized. This functionality is provided by the End of the Line extension.

Upvotes: 582

KUTlime

Reputation: 8057

For those who are looking for a button toggle:

The name of this command is View white space in GUI menu (Edit -> Advanced -> View white space).

The name of this command in the Add command popup is Toggle Visual Space.

Upvotes: 2

Farway

Reputation: 811

Display white space characters

Menu: You can toggle the visibility of the white space characters from the menu: Edit > Advanced > View White Space.

Button: If you want to add the button to a toolbar, it is called Toggle Visual Space in the command category "Edit".
The actual command name is: Edit.ViewWhiteSpace.

Keyboard Shortcut: In Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019 the default keyboard shortcut still is CTRL+R, CTRL+W
Type one after the other.
All default shortcuts

End-of-line characters

Extension: There is a minimal extension adding the displaying of end-of-line characters (LF and CR) to the visual white space mode, as you would expect. Additionally it supplies buttons and short-cuts to modify all line-endings in a document, or a selection.
VisualStudio gallery: End of the Line

Note: Since Visual Studio 2017 there is no option in the File-menu called Advanced Save Options. Changing the encoding and line-endings for a file can be done using Save File As ... and clicking the down-arrow on the right side of the save-button. This shows the option Save with Encoding. You'll be asked permission to overwrite the current file.

Upvotes: 27