# Display invisible characters in CotEditor on Mac

The Invisible Characters feature allows you to draw invisible characters, such as special characters for formatting, in a document with alternative symbols so that you can find where they are.

## Change visibility of invisible characters

### Temporary changing the current document

You can switch the visibility of invisible characters in the current document by performing one of the following:

- Choose the Show/Hide Invisible Characters command in the Format menu.
- Click the Invisibles button in the window toolbar (The Invisibles button can be added by customizing the toolbar).
- Click the Invisibles button in the Touch Bar (The Invisibles button can be added by customizing the Touch Bar).

The change here doesn’t override the CotEditor’s default setting.

### Default setting

You can change the default setting of the invisible visibility in the Window settings by selecting the “Invisible character” checkbox in the “Show” section.

### Print invisible characters on printing

You can set whether to print invisible characters on print in the print dialog.

## Types of invisible characters

In the Window settings, you can set which types of invisible characters are shown when the invisible character display is available. The types correspond to the following characters:

Label | Sym. | Characters (code point) | Description
--- | --- | --- | ---
Line ending | ↩ | U+000A (LINE FEED) U+000D (CARRIAGE RETURN) U+0085 (NEW LINE) U+2028 (LINE SEPARATOR) U+2029 (PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR) | The control characters indicating a line break. The CRLF type line ending (combination of `U+000D` and `U+000A`) is also drawn as a single character.
Tab | → | U+0009 (HORIZONTAL TABULATION) | A kind of whitespace character with a flexible width sending the next character to a certain position. In coding, it is often used for indentation.
Space | · | U+0020 (SPACE) | The standard space character.
Other whitespaces | ·̂ | U+00A0 (NO-BREAK SPACE) U+2007 (FIGURE SPACE) U+202F (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE) | The space characters avoiding breaking the line before/after it.
□ | U+3000 (IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE) | A kind of space characters commonly used in Japanese writing. As known as full-width space.
⹀ | U+2000..U+200A (various spaces) U+205F (MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE) | Whitespace characters in various widths and uses. They correspond to all of the remaining whitespace characters in Unicode category Zs (space separator).
Other control characters | � | U+0000..U+001F (C0) U+007F (DELETE) U+0080..U+009F (C1) U+200B (ZERO WIDTH SPACE) U+200C (ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER) U+2060 (WORD JOINER) U+FEFF (ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE) U+061C, U+200E..U+200F, U+202A..U+202E, U+2066..U+206F (bidi-text controls) U+2061..U+2065 (invisible operators) U+FFF9..U+FFFB (interlinear annotations) | Special characters that are not printed as a graphic character but used for controlling or formatting documents. They correspond to all of Unicode category Cc (control) and some of Cf (format).

## See also

- Change Window settings