Hide non printable characters in vim

Posted by knittl on Super User See other posts from Super User or by knittl
Published on 2014-06-10T09:10:32Z Indexed on 2014/06/10 9:28 UTC
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vim

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ascii

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non-printable

Vim shows non-printable characters prefixed with a ^ (for instance ^@ for a NUL byte). I have a column based file containing both printable and non-printable characters which is difficult to read, since each non-printable character shifts all remaining columns one character to the right.

Is there a way to hide non-printable characters or simply display a placeholder char instead? I also don't mind having every character be represented by two characters.

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