Eclipse: I turned on hidden characters now I can't turn off

Somehow I've turned on hidden characters in Eclipse. It's not the "whitespace" characters in the general editor preferences. When turned on, it adds another layer of hidden characters over the existing ones.

Then I have things like

\r\n

Does anyone know what these are and how to remove them?


It is under Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors. There is a checkbox labeled "Show whitespace characters". If you uncheck this the editor switches back to normal.

If you click on the "whitespace characters" link in this line you will get a popup window, in which you can define which characters eclipse is supposed to consider as whitespace characters.

In this popup window you also get the option to define the transparency in which each whitespace character is displayed in the editor, which you can use to (indirectly) change their foreground colour. I'm just mentioning it here, because it took me about half an hour to find this setting! ;-)


There is a toggle button 'Show Whitespace Chars' on the Eclipse toolbar

screenshot of toolbar showing the Show Whitespace Characters button


A great tip about using 'quick access' from eclipse forum:

CTRL+3 swc

Allows to turn them on and off


The right shortcut is Ctrl + N

UPDATE From Eclipse 3.7 version, something is changed... Now you have to go to:

Window > Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors


CTRL + . does the job.