Changing the color of the whitespace indicator in Visual Studio?

Question

In Visual Studio we can show white space by CTRL+R, CTRL+W. But how can we change the color of the white space indicator itself?

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I would like to change it to a soft gray so it the color is not as strong and not so distracting.

I've added a companion question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35177374/changing-the-color-of-the-whitespace-specifically-for-comments-in-visual-studio to ask specifically what happens if you combine light and dark background at several tokens, as for example comments. — Xavi Montero, Feb 03 '16 at 12:41

score 66 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 15 '12 at 23:28

66

You can do that in Tools / Options and then Environment / Fonts And Colors and there is a setting for visible White Space :

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answered Apr 15 '12 at 23:28

Antonio Bakula

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Sweet - never knew there were so many different things you can change the font for. – JK. Apr 15 '12 at 23:41
there is no tools there is no options, there is no environment. this answer is outdated. – ahnbizcad Jul 23 '21 at 21:14
@ahnbizcad VS 2019 has this like described, what VS version you are using ? – Antonio Bakula Jul 26 '21 at 09:46
@ahnbizcad like antionio mentioned, it's still there. Just checked with my Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise 2022 (64-bit) – Anton Krug Jun 01 '23 at 17:14

score 13 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 08 '22 at 03:09

I was searching on how to do the same on VS code and I ended up on that thread. I found out that you can change it on the settings.json file. This one you can open if you go on Preferences/Settings and search for Color Customizations for the Workbench.

On the json file accordingly you will need to add (if it's not already there) the next property:

    "workbench.colorCustomizations": {
       "editorWhitespace.foreground": "#1e6d9b"
    },

The color should be a hex code. In the example above I have "#1e6d9b" but feel free to replace it with your preference.

To customize for a specific theme only, use syntax like this, where Monokai is the name of the specific theme you want to override the value for:

"workbench.colorCustomizations": {
    "[Monokai]": {
        "editorWhitespace.foreground": "#1e6d9b"
    }
}

Complete reference on customizing a color theme: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/themes#_customizing-a-color-theme
and theme color properties:
https://code.visualstudio.com/api/references/theme-color

Changing the color of the whitespace indicator in Visual Studio?

2 Answers2