micro-editor / micro-editor/micro
Feature request — colored non-breaking spaces
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- Dominant language
- Go
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- Forks
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- Avg merge
- 2d 18h
- Merged PRs (30d)
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Description
Hi,
I really love the non-breaking space highlighting functionnality on Emacs:

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 🙂
Contributor guide
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- 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