Hi there,

I'm used to setting my colours so that all portions of a file that have some text, space, or tab has a background colour (helps me see extra and unecessary whitespaces), but I can't seem to figure this out.

If I change the "whitespace" bgcolor the whole file gets highlighted.

If I change every single colour syntax "element" (eg PHP functions, strings, etc) to a bg, all of it has a bgcolor except for actual spaces and tabs.

Here's an example of how it looks:



Here's how I want it to look:

Why don't you just turn on the Show hidden characters display? Click the paragraph symbol button in the Editor toolbar or select the option in the View menu. It sounds like this will do what you want.

Unfortunately I don't think that works. The hidden character symbols show but their background does not change colour. Even if it worked hidden characters are hugely inconvenient.

Here's what it looks like:



I do note that in an older version this seems to have been working fine, but it looks like it was later changed .

See here for the request to change from the old way to the way it current works. What happened is that the definition of "whitespace" was changed so that it involved everything after the EOL.

syntax-coloring-t2180.html?highlight=background

Is there any way the developers might consider keeping the old functionality and the new under 2 different options?

OK, I don't think I fully understand why you want this. Using Show hidden characters certainly will help you see any extra whitespace, but I suppose you have some other reason for wanting the background colored differently. Personally, I think it is very distracting to have large chunks of text with with a background different from the document color. But that is just me ...

I agree with rudder here. Homesite highlights all PHP code and it really helps it stand out from the HTML. It matters less now that my development is almost exclusively done with smarty templates (no more php in my html), but I had also attempted to find a way to highlight php blocks when I installed phped.

it's not that hard to set a common background for all the php blocks, just set background colod for the Whitespace.
Do you have something more above this in Homesite?

Well, when you set the background for whitespace it colors the whole page, rather than just the whitespace characters.

This is how homesite colors whitepace + code (this is the second picture from the original post)

Not really for whole page, but for a language. For example if you have php + html + js + css in one file and you set whitespace background for php, you'll get all php blocks colored differently than the others. It's quite convenient for some developers.

Regarding what you get in HomeSite, I agree with svenax, it's quite distracting.

I just like that style of highlighting because I can easily see when other developers have added unecessary spaces and tab characters in the code (say at the end of code). It also helps me focus squarely on the code itself.

I find the current method really distracting, but who am I to say what is and what isn't if nobody else agrees with me? . I would hazard a guess though, that while it seems minor, that this style of highlighting is the DEFAULT in Homesite... and if there are any other developers like me, who have stuck to Homesite for the past 5 years, they might also be used to this style of highlighting and might find switching to PHPED less jolting if they had this particular feature.