mcauley-penney / visual-whitespace.nvim

A Neovim plugin to highlight whitespace characters in visual mode

🔎 visual-whitespace.nvim

Reveal whitespace characters in visual mode, similar to VSCode.

_{GIF: Highlighting in charwise-visual and linewise-visual}

Installation and configuration

To install it with the default settings using Lazy:

  {
   'mcauley-penney/visual-whitespace.nvim',
    config = true
  }

visual-whitespace comes with the following default settings:

    opts = {
     highlight = { link = 'Visual' },
     space_char = '·',
     tab_char = '→',
     nl_char = '↲',
     cr_char = '←'
    },

Credit

• This post on the Neovim subreddit, for doing a lot of the math for me
• aaron-p1/match-visual.nvim

visual-whitespace.nvim's Issues

[bug]: wrong background highlight

Description

The background on whitespaces keeps the highlight of the default background color, instead of the visual selection highlight.

Screenshots

example.mp4

Info

• Windows 10 19045.4046
• Windows Terminal 1.19.10573.0
• NVIM v0.10.0-dev-ee276f8
• visual-whitespace commit: 100c308

Error when using CRLF

When you have a file with CR + LF and you go to visual mode, the following error is thrown:

Error detected while processing ModeChanged Autocommands for "*:[vV]":
Error executing lua callback: ...im/lazy/visual-whitespace.nvim/lua/visual-whitespace.lua:104: Invalid 'col': out of range
stack traceback:
        [C]: in function 'nvim_buf_set_extmark'
        ...im/lazy/visual-whitespace.nvim/lua/visual-whitespace.lua:104: in function 'apply_marks'
        ...im/lazy/visual-whitespace.nvim/lua/visual-whitespace.lua:135: in function <...im/lazy/visual-whitespace.nvim/lua/visual-whitespace.lua:115>

Reproduction

1. Open a file
2. Enable :set fileformat=dos
3. Enter some newlines
4. Go to visual mode

Expected behavior

I think we should definitely show both charaacters (CR AND LF). We already got a character for LF. I'd recommend an arrow to the right for CR, something like:

⃪

or we could combine them into a single character like:

↩

Exception when getting into visual mode

Error executing lua callback: ...im/lazy/visual-whitespace.nvim/lua/visual-whitespace.lua:60: attempt to call field 'unpack' (a nil value)                                                                                                                                        
stack traceback:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
        ...im/lazy/visual-whitespace.nvim/lua/visual-whitespace.lua:60: in function <...im/lazy/visual-whitespace.nvim/lua/visual-whitespace.lua:53>      

Both on 0.10 and 0.9.5

NVIM v0.9.5
Build type: Release
LuaJIT 2.1.1703358377

   system vimrc file: "$VIM/sysinit.vim"
  fall-back for $VIM: "/opt/homebrew/Cellar/neovim/0.9.5/share/nvim"

Run :checkhealth for more info

Show zero width characters

First of all: GREAT PLUGIN! I absolutely love it!

Second: I think it'd be extremely useful if the plugin could also show if there are zero width characters, such as:

​

yep, you cannot see this :)

While zero width characters are very rare, it will definitely save like hours of wasted time if one can find them very quickly.

feat: add support for other visual modes

I'd like to add support for at least

• visual linewise
• visual blockwise

In time, we may attempt to support others as well. See :h mode() for a list.

perf: don't process the entire body of text for every movement

As of right now, the plugin gets the entire visual selection and parses it for whitespace on every CursorMoved. For example, if we have 100 lines selected and we move down one line, we get the entire 101 lines and parse it again, despite extmarks already existing. We do not need to parse the entire thing again.

We should be able to improve performance by only parsing the text between the last cursor position during visual mode and the current cursor position. For example, instead of parsing the entire 100 lines again just to add extmarks to one line, start at the last cursor position (row, col) and just parse up to the new row col.

feat: read `vim.opt.listchars` for the default config

Read the content from :help 'listchars' for the default config, which reduces duplicated icon config.