Show non-printable characters (--show-all) but NOT for space, newline or CR?

[milnak]

I'm looking to show any non-printable character (along with "--nonprintable-notation unicode") but I don't need to see spaces or newlines. Is there any way to do this?

[keith-hall]

Hi, good question. This is not possible out of the box. The highlighting of special chars is handled by a special syntax definition, I imagine you'd need to copy https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/blob/master/assets/syntaxes/02_Extra/show-nonprintable.sublime-syntax, removing the matches (or updating the regular expressions) for characters you don't want. If you save it as a custom asset with nothing else changed, I think it would replace the built-in one.

Then, if showing but not highlighting spaces and newlines is still undesirable, you'd also want to introduce a new notation perhaps at

bat/src/bin/bat/app.rs

Lines 197 to 217 in 0da4084

	language: self
	.matches
	.get_one::<String>("language")
	.map(|s| s.as_str())
	.or_else(|| {
	if self.matches.get_flag("show-all") {
	Some("show-nonprintable")
	} else {
	None
	}
	}),
	show_nonprintable: self.matches.get_flag("show-all"),
	nonprintable_notation: match self
	.matches
	.get_one::<String>("nonprintable-notation")
	.map(|s| s.as_str())
	{
	Some("unicode") => NonprintableNotation::Unicode,
	Some("caret") => NonprintableNotation::Caret,
	_ => unreachable!("other values for --nonprintable-notation are not allowed"),
	},

and update the pre-processor to not replace those characters

bat/src/preprocessor.rs

Line 78 in 0da4084

' ' => output.push('·'),