Bug 488784

Summary:	icon request: show whitespaces / show all characters
Product:	[Plasma] Breeze	Reporter:	Gary Wang <wzc782970009>
Component:	Icons	Assignee:	visual-design
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	kainz.a, m, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Other
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Gary Wang 2024-06-20 12:30:15 UTC

I'm a user of Notepad++-style editor, which provides a lot of common-used features in their toolbar and makes the toolbar icon-only. One of the features is "Show all characters" which allows user see all characters which are usually hard to distinguish or invisible, like Tab and Space, CR LF and LF.

I'd like to contribute such a feature to Kate so I can use it the same way, so icons for such action are needed. The icons I think we might need are:

1. Show whitespaces
2. Show non-printable spaces
3. Show all characters

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

If you would like to try out the "Show all characters" feature but don't want to install Windows or use Wine, you can try other Notepad++-clones like the following ones, which I confirmed have such feature:

- Notepadqq: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/notepadqq/
- NotepadNext: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.dail8859.NotepadNext
- Notepad--: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/notepad---git
- Textosaurus: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.martinrotter.textosaurus

About the feature itself, I currently have a MR to add the "Show whitespaces" action to KTextEditor, see:

- https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/ktexteditor/-/merge_requests/698

Comment 1 Gary Wang 2024-07-03 13:35:14 UTC

Some info might be helpful for creating related icons:

For the "Show whitespaces" action, the glyph of the ␣ (U+2423 OPEN BOX) character can be used as reference, which itself is the graphic for space.

For the "Show non-printable spaces" action, I actually don't have any good idea but the glyph of the ␢ (U+2422 BLANK SYMBOL) character might be good to be used as reference, which itself is the graphic for (blank) space. Actually U+2400-2421 is for these non-printable control characters, like U+240A is LF and so on, KCharSelect can be used to check those characters. Alternatively, ☒ (U+2612 BALLOT BOX WITH X) can be used as reference, which more likely a tofu character.

For the "Show all characters" action, the glyph of the ¶ (U+00B6 PILCROW SIGN) character can be used as reference. This is the icon that most Notepad++-clones (include Notepad++ itself) use for such action.

Whatever acceptable or not I'm both fine with VDG's decision, hope that helps :)