Finding your way in the maze of Atom settings – awarding and frustrating at the same time
Posted by jpluimers on 2017/03/01
The main Atom menu allows you to change both Config and Stylesheet
I’ve been using Atom as a text editor on Mac OS X for quite a while now, but never delved into the detailed settings.
Somehow, that version wasn’t the type of program that auto-updates itself, nor notifies the user of new updates (it only did that for outdated packages). This seems to be fixed for Mac OS X, but not yet for Linux.
So I hadn’t noticed my version was really old version, which meant that showing “Invisible” characters like spaces and tabs had a high opacity.
Since Atom is highly hackable, it wasn’t hard to find a solution for the old version, which involved changing config files (also accessible from the menu, see the screenshot on the right):
- Config: ~/.atom/config.cson (.cson files are CoffeeScript Object Notation files)
- Stylesheet: ~/.atom/styles.less (.less files are for the Less stylesheet language)
What struck me is that searching for this kind of information got me directed to solutions for old Atom versions. Apparently my Google-fu isn’t good enough, or Google has trouble estimating relevancy of Atom information.
What helped was looking at this poart of the config.cson file:
editor:
invisibles: {}
showInvisibles: true
Back when searching,
- this got me many irrelevant search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=atom+”showinvisibles”+site:atom.io
- getting more relevant search meant excluding domains: https://www.google.com/search?q=atom+”showinvisibles”+-site:atom.io+-site:github.com
The latter lead me to these interesting pages:
- [HOWTO] Show space, tabs and newlines (invisibles) in Atom 1.x | The _khAttAm_ blog (which links to an old version of the documentation)
- Basic Customization: configuration-key-reference (which as of writing is the correct documenation)
-
Invisibles can be fully managed in the Atom settings
Show only whitespaces in Atom (not EOL) – Stack Overflow (which isn’t up-to-date any more as you now can configure this from the settings) made me realise that you can also set the values to false instead of a character:
editor:
invisibles:
cr: false
eol: false
space: false
tab: false
showInvisibles: true
versus
editor:
invisibles:
cr: "↵"
eol: "￢"
space: "⋅"
tab: "⇥"
showInvisibles: true
These are the symbols I used above:
- CR: Unicode Character ‘DOWNWARDS ARROW WITH CORNER LEFTWARDS’ (U+21B5) or
Unicode Character ‘SYMBOL FOR CARRIAGE RETURN’ (U+240D) - EOL: Unicode Character ‘FULLWIDTH NOT SIGN’ (U+FFE2) or
Unicode Character ‘SYMBOL FOR NEWLINE’ (U+2424) - SPACE: Unicode Character ‘DOT OPERATOR’ (U+22C5) or
Unicode Character ‘OPEN BOX’ (U+2423) or
Unicode Character ‘SYMBOL FOR SPACE’ (U+2420) - TAB: Unicode Character ‘RIGHTWARDS ARROW TO BAR’ (U+21E5) or
Unicode Character ‘SYMBOL FOR HORIZONTAL TABULATION’ (U+2409)
These are the default symbols:
- CR: Unicode Character ‘CURRENCY SIGN’ (U+00A4)
- EOL: Unicode Character ‘NOT SIGN’ (U+00AC)
- SPACE: Unicode Character ‘MIDDLE DOT’ (U+00B7)
- TAB: Unicode Character ‘RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK’ (U+00BB)
editor:
invisibles:
cr: "¤"
eol: "¬"
space: "·"
tab: "»"
showInvisibles: true
Note that the issue that invisible characters in the middle of the line and any punctiation space are hidden is still unresolved: Show all invisible characters · Issue #2572 · atom/atom
–jeroen
via:
- Atom is so powerful that it blows my mind – Atom Discussion
- Show only whitespaces in Atom (not EOL) – Stack Overflow
- Changing invisibles characters – support – Atom Discussion
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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