2

Like this: enter image description here

I have been able to get whitespace-mode to display dots for leading spaces.

enter image description here

But I want to specially display each sequence of 2 leading spaces, with maybe a vertical bar.

Possible?

Maybe not with whitespace-mode?

As a separate question, how do I get whitespace-mode to display only leading spaces as middle-dot?

I have 

    whitespace-space-regexp "\\(^ +\\)"

...but that seems only to apply to the FACE used, not to the character substitution.

I've been fiddling with this for 20 minutes. I'm amazed that I still have not cracked this. Doesn't everyone want something like this?

Cheeso
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  • The existing vertical bar solutions in Elisp are not that good, but you may wish to play around with vline.el and the libraries that build upon / modify that library. I am working on feature requests 17684 and 22873 in my spare time, but I am probably a year or two (or more) away from perfecting them. [It just depends upon how spare time I have, combined with motivation ... The next patch proof concept will probably be available in about a month or so ...] Fill-column-indicator by Alp Aker may also be of interest to you -- it an be tweaked ... – lawlist Sep 19 '18 at 04:26
  • See also: https://superuser.com/a/608910/206164 and other threads that can be found with Googling things like: emacs vertical highlight; emacs verticular ruler, etc. – lawlist Sep 19 '18 at 04:35

1 Answers1

1

Relying on font-lock and compose-region, I can sort of get emacs to do what I want. This stuff:

(defun yaml-pretty-search-leading-ws (limit)
  "Function to search for leading whitespace, and invoke
`compose-region' on ranges within it, to display the whitespace
differently: display a dot and a vertical bar for the sequence.

This fn is intended to be invoked indirectly via font-lock as a
search/matcher. It doesn't return a positive match to font-lock.

At the finish, all of the leading whitespace up to LIMIT should
be composed and fontified."

  (let ((start (point)))
    (save-match-data ;; we don't want font-lock to fontify.
      ;; 2 consecutive spaces
      (while (re-search-forward "  " limit t)
        (let ((start (match-beginning 0))
              (stop (match-end 0)))
          (put-text-property start stop 'face 'yaml-pretty-leading-ws-face)
          (compose-region start (1- stop) ?·)
          (compose-region (1- stop) stop ?|)
          )))))

(defvar yaml-pretty-flock-keywords
  '((yaml-pretty-search-leading-ws . yaml-pretty-leading-ws-face)))

(font-lock-add-keywords nil yaml-pretty-flock-keywords)

Results in :

enter image description here

For static text display, this is exactly what I wanted.

Now I need to get it to do the inverse - "un-compose" the region, and remove the face property - as I modify the leading whitespace.

Cheeso
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