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Orcs Goblins and .NET

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Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio

Something quite horrible happened to me today. While I was working on some of my code, I accidentally hit some keys while holding the control key down. Unfortunately for me I did not see the keys I hit. Well now instead of seeing whitespace there were this little dots. I figured there was some checkbox in Visual Studio’s options. I could not find it anywhere, but I did discover a cool hack. In the fonts section, I found it keeps font information for Visible Whitespace. By changing the font color to white, I wouldn’t have to see the dots anymore or so I thought. Whenever I highlighted one of the dots I could see it again.

Now with my frustration building, what can I say I hate dots, I began trying different keyboard shortcuts. I eventually found what turns on and off white space.

The Answer:    Control + E + S

Hopefully no one else must suffer through the horror that is visible white space.

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Published Friday, September 15, 2006 11:54 AM by Brendan

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# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Tuesday, September 26, 2006 7:22 PM

I hate them too!! I spent a good 15 minutes trying to figure out what I hit.  Eventually i went to the registry and found the value to reset. Here's the key to reset

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\?.?\Text Editor\

I changed the "Visible Whitespace" to 0.

Thanks for posting the key stroke

John

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Thursday, October 05, 2006 4:57 AM

I found this post on a google search for "visual studio space dots". Thank you for ending my pain

Anthony

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Thursday, October 05, 2006 8:59 AM

It seems that a lot of people have accidentally turned this annoyance on. When I was trying to find the solution I could not find an answer on google. Lots of different searches turned up Visual Studio stuff, but I couldn't find anything about these dots.

Brendan

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Tuesday, October 10, 2006 3:39 AM

i found from google with this search statement - "dots" instead of space in visual studio - =) it was pesky.Thanks very much.

volkan

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Tuesday, October 10, 2006 8:31 AM

Thanks a lot guys! Control + E + S dosen't work, but the registry hint was very good. By the way: it takes me 3 hours to solve the problem and I was thinking of reinstalling my Visual Studio :-)

blub

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Friday, November 10, 2006 6:11 AM

Ctrl + R + W for 2005 at least!

Zubair Khan

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Tuesday, November 14, 2006 6:23 PM

I'm using VS 2003 and the above did not work. I ended up finding this via the menu's here:

Edit > Advanced > View White Space

That also informed me that the key command is:

Ctrl+R , Ctrl+W

Not either, or Ctrl+R+W, but while holding Ctrl down press R and then W, not releasing Ctrl until you've finished with W. I know, seems simple, but it really wasn't intuitive to me.

Dan

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Wednesday, November 15, 2006 2:17 PM

Visual Studio like doing those 2-button keyboard shortcuts. There are a bunch of them out there.

One interesting feature at least in VS2005 is that if you hit ctrl and one other key (for example 'w'), it will display in the lower letft

(Ctrl+W) was pressed. Waiting for second key of cord...

For keys which it uses these 2-button shortcuts it will wait to see if you hit another key.

Yeah I think R+W must be the VS 2003 shortcut.

Brendan

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Monday, April 02, 2007 8:33 PM

The different key combinations are not a function of the version, they seem to be more a function of the VS environemtn settings you chose. i.e. Visual Basic v.s. C# vs. General

Hoop

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Monday, April 02, 2007 11:35 PM

Just...you've saved my life dude

Dario Quintana

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Wednesday, April 11, 2007 4:58 AM

Phew, thanks for hinting to the edit-menu-entry! I just scrambled through the huge hotkey list, but gave up then...
A search on google "visual studio editor whitespaces" brought me here, but I spent already one hour with this.. mess ;)
I think of a new term with this large editors:
Hotkey-Hell
Bye ;)

Flo

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Thursday, June 28, 2007 3:21 AM

It took so long to figure out yesterday after working with those blue dots all day! I've finally found a solution, thanks guys!

Ken

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Wednesday, July 04, 2007 12:01 AM

Thanks you for this post! Yesterday I accidentally tured this ON but was not able to find how to turn this OFF. Nice to know its Ctrl + E + S ... :-) Thanks, -Vks

Vikas Panchal

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Wednesday, July 18, 2007 8:42 AM

THANKS A LOT!!!! I tried 2 hours to reproduce that keyboard shortcut. The problem with the edit menu is that your texteditor window has to have mousefocus for the entry to appear..... After hitting control+"anything else" that's quite unlikely..... FINALLY!!!

Daniel

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Monday, August 20, 2007 2:30 PM

OMG, Thank you, thank you!!

Marc

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Tuesday, August 28, 2007 9:16 AM

I too had the same issue.... Thanks a lot for ur solution...... :-)

Roshni

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Friday, September 28, 2007 9:32 AM

Thank god. I too mauled a bunch of keys while doing a Ctrl + combo and ended up with these whitespace dots. Ctrl + E + S works nicely. Thanks

Dom

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12:34 PM

YES YES THANK YOU! I was absolutely mad that day until found your solution.

Oleg

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Saturday, November 17, 2007 3:08 AM

Thanks a lot!!!

Bajskorv

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Tuesday, January 22, 2008 2:32 PM

I am so glad that I found this. Having the visible while space displayed was driving me up the fricking wall. I did a workaround by setting the foreground color to white, but still hated seeing those characters when selecting blocks of text. Thanks a million.

Toph

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Monday, January 28, 2008 4:26 PM

Thankyou

kris

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Monday, February 25, 2008 3:51 PM

Man. I just can't believe what a nightmarish web of crap the VS settings system is. Unbelievable.

Aidan

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Sunday, March 30, 2008 11:44 AM

THANK YOU!!! I've been sitting here messing with these dots for the last 10 minutes! This is how time just gets eaten up. THANK YOU for posting the keystrokes!

SD

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Monday, May 05, 2008 7:26 AM

Thank you you saved my life! Same thing happened to me... I've had to put up with the "dots" for a a week now but couldn't just take it anymore... resetting settings didn't help either. THANKS AGAIN!

Binarypapa

# re: Visible Whitespace in Visual Studio @ Saturday, May 10, 2008 1:02 PM

Tnx for saving my sanity. In VS2005, there seems no other way to disable these whitespace than by the ctrl r w...

dk6ii

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