show-invisibles-plus package

More show invisibles.

A screenshot of rectangle-selection package

Features

Show customizable placeholders for ideographic-space, nbsp and control characters.
Show borders for various whitespace, zero width characters and control characters.
Option to show only the selected area.
Better performance independent of file size.

About the two types of implementation

This package runs two different implementations depending on whether tree-sitter is enabled or not.

Tree-sitter is enabled by default since Atom editor 1.32. You can switch tree-sitter from 'Settings => Core => Use Tree Sitter Parsers'.

When tree-sitter is disabled, It works with text-mate's grammer-injection feature. It is highly stable because most of the processing is done using only the API. This implementation cannot be made to work when tree-sitter is enabled, because tree-sitter breaks compatibility and no alternative is yet available.

When tree-sitter is enabled, It works by applying a patch to text-buffer. It is faster, but may stop working if there are changes in the code of the Atom editor itself. Please disable tree-sitter if you encounter any problems with the Atom editor version upgrade.