Show invisible characters in CotEditor on Mac

You can show formatting characters—such as spaces, tabs, and line endings—in your document using alternative symbols so that you can see where they appear.

The color for invisible characters is set in the theme.

Change the default settings of invisible characters

  1. Go to the CotEditor app on your Mac.

  2. Choose CotEditor > Settings, then click Window.

  3. To change the visibility of invisible characters, select “Invisible characters” in the Show section.

    To select the types of invisible characters to show, select checkboxes under “Invisible characters”.

    The available types correspond to the following characters:

    LabelSym.Characters (code point)Description
    Line ending
    • U+000A (LINE FEED)
    • U+000D (CARRIAGE RETURN)
    • U+0085 (NEW LINE)
    • U+2028 (LINE SEPARATOR)
    • U+2029 (PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR)

    Control characters that indicate a line break. CRLF line endings (a combination of U+000D and U+000A) are drawn as a single symbol.

    Tab
    • U+0009 (HORIZONTAL TABULATION)

    A kind of whitespace character with a flexible width sending the next character to a certain position. Commonly used for indentation in programming.

    Space
    • U+0020 (SPACE)

    The standard space character.

    Other whitespace
    • U+00A0 (NO-BREAK SPACE)
    • U+2007 (FIGURE SPACE)
    • U+202F (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE)

    Space characters that prevent line breaks before or after them.

    • U+3000 (IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE)

    A space character commonly used in Japanese writing. Also known as “full-width space.”

    • U+2000..U+200A (various spaces)
    • U+205F (MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE)

    Whitespace characters with various widths and uses. They correspond to all remaining 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+2061..U+2065 (invisible operators)
    • U+FFF9..U+FFFB (interlinear annotations)

    Special characters that don’t appear as visible glyphs but control or format the document. They correspond to all Unicode category Cc (control) and some of Cf (format).

Temporarily change the visibility of invisible characters for the current document

  1. In the CotEditor app on your Mac, open a document.

  2. Do one of the following:

    • Choose Format > Show/Hide Invisible Characters.

    • Click the Invisibles button in the window toolbar (The Invisibles button can be added by customizing the toolbar).

    These changes don’t override the default visibility setting.

Include invisible characters to printing

You can choose whether to print invisible characters in the Print dialog.

See also