How to show non printing characters in nano

Question

Is there a way to show or toggle non printing characters like newline or tab in nano?

At first let's assume the file is plain ascii.

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 11 '20 at 14:16

19

If it is not configured for "tiny", nano can display printable characters for tab and space, but it has no special provision for newline.

This is documented in the manual:

set whitespace "string"
Set the two characters used to indicate the presence of tabs and spaces. They must be single-column characters. The default pair for a UTF-8 locale is "»·", and for other locales ">.".

and can be enabled/disabled while editing:

Whitespace Display Toggle (Meta-P)

toggles whitespace display mode if you have a "whitespace" option in your nanorc. See Nanorc Files, for more info.

edited Jun 11 '20 at 14:16

Community

1

answered Sep 29 '16 at 21:02

Thomas Dickey

76,765

2

On a MAC "Meta" key is the "esc" key by default. – QuickPrototype Jul 01 '20 at 10:05
6

on Windows via SSH it's ALT-P, though it didn't actually make any difference to what was displayed – Matthew Lock Dec 02 '21 at 05:00
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Regarding pressing (Meta-P): Is there a way to make this permanent, for example via a Setting? So we don't have to press (Meta-P) every time we open a file.. – spaceman Mar 30 '23 at 08:22

How to show non printing characters in nano

1 Answers1