micro-editor / micro-editor/micro

Feature request — colored non-breaking spaces

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#947 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Go
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Description

Hi,

I really love the non-breaking space highlighting functionnality on Emacs:

image

The on-breaking space (U+00A0 or more commonly known as   in HTML) is really important in typography and I often use the Unicode character in HTML source code instead of the   escape code. The benefit is that a b is much more readable than a b, and the drawback is that it’s hard to differenciate a regular space from a non-breaking space without any special highlighting.

So, it would be awesome if micro could slightly highlight U+00A0. The simple Emacs’ colored underline looks good enough to me. Is it possible to implement this functionnality as a plugin?

(Of course, I can edit every single syntax file I use and copy-paste the same rule for those non-breaking spaces, but this looks like a rather ugly fix to me. I really prefer highlighting non-breaking spaces globally with one single setting, as Emacs does.)

Thanks for all the nice work you’ve done so far 🙂

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by locating micro's global highlighting and plugin-related code, then trace how syntax highlighting is applied across buffers. Done means U+00A0 characters receive consistent visual highlighting globally without editing each syntax file, with coverage for the behavior added where appropriate.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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