How to turn on invisible characters in TextMate

By default, TextMate doesn’t display invisible, or whitespace, characters. It is easy to turn on should you need it. You can enable it from inside the application and it persists between sessions and projects.

To enable invisible characters, from the menu go to; View -> Show Invisible Characters.

Or if you prefer keyboard commands ⌥ + ⌘ + I.

To disable (hide) invisible characters, from the menu you should go to; View -> Hide Invisible Characters.

Or press ⌥ + ⌘ + I again.

Why would you show invisible characters in TextMate?

The most common reason is that all whitespace characters look almost identical to the human eye, but are interpretted by computers very differently. This can lead to issues when you’re copying code from one place to another, especially in languages that care a lot about whitespace.

If you’re having a hard time understanding why a line of code is throwing a syntax error, try turning on invisible characters and seeing if that is the reason.