How to show / show hidden or invisible characters in NetBeans?

Question

How can you show / show hidden characters in NetBeans? In other editors, if this feature is enabled, the space may appear as a small centered dot, and the tab - the right arrow. (This function is useful to see if a file uses tabs or spaces for indentation, by the way.)

Answer 1

This feature has been missing for a long time - in November 1999 a function request was created, and it was finally implemented in August 2010 (NetBeans 6.10). You can enable / disable it in "View → Show inappropriate characters."

Error history

As with NetBeans 7.0.1, the definition for "non-printable" seems to include tabs and carriage returns, but not a regular char space:

NetBeans 7.1.0 finally displays spaces. However, now it has a new error in which successive tabs (or combinations of tabs and spaces) are collapsed into one tab:

NetBeans 7.4.0 fixes this:

There is another mistake: the end of the file is represented by the same character as the lines, so make it non-obvious to determine if the file ends with EOL. This problem has not been addressed so far.

Answer 2

in netbeans 7 you can enable the display of spaces, tabs and line feeds as follows:

spaces

• Download the font from: http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=97902
• install ttf font
• Tools> Options> Font & Colors> Syntaxes> All Languages> Spaces
• select installed white space font
• more netbeans 6 error info: http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4619

tabs and row feeds

in netbeans 7 you can enable viewing of non-printable characters:

• view> show non-printable characters

in netbeans 6 only part of the spaces work

Answer 3

Using Netbeans 8.0.1

View-> Show characters without printing

Answer 4

Ubuntu 11.10 => Netbeans 7.0.1

The "View → Show non-printable characters" mode does not really show spaces, and the font was not installed by me.

Thank!

Answer 5

Using Netbeans 7.3.1,

View → Show non-printable characters

I see white spaces, tabs and carriage returns.

Answer 6

This feature has been added and is available in NetBeans 6.10. Since this has not yet been released, you can try 6.10 MileStone 1: http://bits.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.10/m1/ . I look forward to the final release!