The Kate editor lacks the basic features that other editors have. There is no "show whitespace" button and option, e.g. tabs, newlines, spaces etc. This is a very important functionality, useful when editing text files for different systems, sometimes it is worth knowing what characters contain a text file in addition to the text itself. Ideally, it should be a button on the top bar of buttons (of course to choose from). KATE 22.07.70 Windows 10 KDE 5.93 Qt 5.15.2
View->Show Non Printable Spaces shows Tabs and Spaces.
Eric, thank you for your answer. It is actually possible to set the "whitespace" view with the appropriate options. However, I mean the possibility of adding a button "show all whitespace", including tabs, end of line, etc.
I hope I got this correctly now: you would like to have a button for the existing action (show non printable spaces), instead of having to select it from the menu? If so: 1. Right-click menu bar -> select main tool bar 2. Right-click tool bar -> Configure Toolbars 3. In Toolbar select Main toolbar Katepartview 4. Choose Show non printable spaces (and maybe an icon) and save I know this does not fully solve your problem, as you are asking for separate buttons for the different whitespace characters and probably would like to have the buttons on the toolbar by default. However, I currently feel that would not be a great decision: - I think most users do not need to frequently change this setting - One action is sufficient for most users - We would need to find or create a proper icon for this action, so the toolbar does not look so weird with the long text On another note, newlines are always visualized to my understanding by, well ehm, new lines.
I mean one button that would show or hide all types of whitespace in a text file. Such a button is available, for example, in the Notepadqq editor and LibreOffice Writer. Of course, it could be an extra button that I add manually to the toolbar and to which I manually add an icon.
In the settings there is the option to show some white space indicator. That would I assume cover this. There is no explicit button to enable that in the menu. Not that sure if that really is an often changed feature to put there.
> In the settings there is the option to show some white space indicator. That would I assume cover this. This is not sufficient, I think. I just checked on Windows what Notepad++ actually does. It has different visualizations for all white space characters. e.g. tabs are visualized as -> and spaces as a dot (as is currently) and even \r\n is visualized differently. https://metadataconsulting.blogspot.com/2019/06/Notepad-Control-Characters-Explained.html