Displaying invisible characters

The Invisible Characters feature allows you to draw invisible characters, such as special characters for formatting, in a document with alternative symbols so that you can find where they are.

Toggling visibility of invisible characters

Temporary changing the current document

You can toggle the visibility of invisible characters in the current document by performing one of the following:

The change here doesn’t override the CotEditor's default setting.

Default setting

You can change the default setting of the invisible visibility in the Preferences' Appearance pane by selecting “Show invisible character” checkbox.

Printing invisible characters on print

You can set whether printing also invisible characters on print in the Preferences' Print pane for the default setting, or in the print dialog for an individual document.

Types of invisible characters

In the Preferences' Appearance pane, you can set which types of invisible characters are shown when the invisible character display is enabled. The types correspond to the following characters:

LabelSym.Characters (code point)Description
Line ending
  • U+000A (LINE FEED)
  • U+000D (CARRIAGE RETURN)
The control characters indicating a line break. The CRLF type line ending (combination of U+000D and U+000A) is also drawn as a single character.
Tab
  • U+0009 (HORIZONTAL TABULATION)
A kind of whitespace character with a flexible width sending the next character to a certain position. In coding, it is often used for indentation.
Space
  • U+0020 (SPACE)
The sandard space character.
Other
whitespaces
  • U+00A0 (NO-BREAK SPACE)
  • U+2007 (FIGURE SPACE)
  • U+202F (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE)
The space characters avoiding breaking the line before/after it.
  • U+3000 (IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE)
A kind of space characters commonly used in Japanese writing. As known as full-width space.
  • U+2000..U+200A (various spaces)
  • U+205F (MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE)
Whitespace characters in various widths and uses. They correspond to all of the remaining whitespace characters in Unicode category Zs (space separator).
Other
control characters
  • U+0000..U+001F (C0)
  • U+007F (DELETE)
  • U+0080..U+009F (C1)
  • U+200B (ZERO WIDTH SPACE)
  • U+200C (ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER)
  • U+2060 (WORD JOINER)
  • U+FEFF (ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE)
  • U+061C, U+200E..U+200F, U+202A..U+202E, U+2066..U+206F (bidi-text controls)
  • U+FFF9..U+FFFB (interlinear annotations)
Special characters that are not printed as a graphic character but used for controlling or formatting documents. They correspond to all of Unicode category Cc (control) and some of Cf (format).

See also