How to hide columns like the way we hide rows?

[Thomas Zito]

So I have some nested HTML that I am miffed about when I view it and see the massive amount of whitespace to the left. In the worst case it takes up half of my monitor. How can I hide it?

                                                        </div>
                                                      </div>
                                                    </div>
                                                  </div>
                                                </div>
                                              </div>
                                            </div>
                                          </div>
                                        </div>
                                      </div>
                                    </div>
                                  </div>

It’d be nice to tell Notepad++ to hide the giant mass of whitespace. I could reformat the HTML, sure, but I’m pretty sure Notepad++ as a very godlike text editor has this feature in it. Somewhere. Hopefully…?

[Mark Olson]

XMLTools is a good plugin for working with XML and thus HTML, but there doesn’t seem to be a plugin command in XMLTools for doing exactly the thing you’re asking for.

However, it’s pretty easy to remove all the line-leading whitespace before an open or close tag in HTML: just use the find/replace form (Search Mode = Regular expressions, Wrap Around checked) to Replace All instances of (?-s)^\h*(?=</?\w+) with nothing.

For example, this would change

<foo>
	<bar>
		<baz>
		none of this
		leading whitespace
		will disappear
			<quz>note that all the whitespace
			before the "quz" close tag
			will NOT go away (because it's not line-leading)            </quz>
			<zugen>
				<jugy>
				deepest indent
				</jugy>
			</zugen>
		</baz>
	</bar>
	more text
	blah blah          <quz>more whitespace that won't go away          </quz>
</foo>

to

<foo>
<bar>
<baz>
		none of this
		leading whitespace
		will disappear
<quz>note that all the whitespace
			before the "quz" close tag
			will NOT go away (because it's not line-leading)            </quz>
<zugen>
<jugy>
				deepest indent
</jugy>
</zugen>
</baz>
</bar>
	more text
	blah blah          <quz>more whitespace that won't go away          </quz>
</foo>

[Mark Olson]

If you wanted to ensure that all open and close tags are at the beginning of a line, you could instead replace all (?-s)(^)?\h*(?=</?\w+) with (?1:\r\n).

See documentation on substitution conditionals to help understand that replacement, but basically this find/replace is saying “remove all whitespace before the close tag, and then if it’s not at the start of the line, add a newline before it”.

In this case,

<foo>
	<bar>
		<baz>
		none of this
		leading whitespace
		will disappear
			<quz>note that all the whitespace
			before the "quz" close tag
			will NOT go away (because it's not line-leading)            </quz>
			<zugen>
				<jugy>
				deepest indent<deep>blah blah</deep>
				</jugy>
			</zugen>
		</baz>
	</bar>
	more text
	blah blah          <quz>more whitespace that won't go away          </quz>
</foo>

would be converted to

<foo>
<bar>
<baz>
		none of this
		leading whitespace
		will disappear
<quz>note that all the whitespace
			before the "quz" close tag
			will NOT go away (because it's not line-leading)
</quz>
<zugen>
<jugy>
				deepest indent
<deep>blah blah
</deep>
</jugy>
</zugen>
</baz>
</bar>
	more text
	blah blah
<quz>more whitespace that won't go away
</quz>
</foo>

[Thomas Zito]

@Mark-Olson Hi Mark,

I did consider a regex to delete whitespace before tags, but then how will I get the whitespace back after any edits are made? C-z works is too much potential for human error.

For the human error reason, I don’t want to eliminate whitespace, just hide it (by hiding the columns).

It sounds like this isn’t an existing feature in Notepad++. And someone did ask about it and created an issue, I just bumped the issue now: https://github.com/notepad-plus-plus/notepad-plus-plus/issues/14112

I don’t know if the forum etiquette here is to close a topic or leave it open… technically there’s no more help needed since there is nothing to do until someone does a PR, but this topic now effectively just links to an issue on the npp issues tracker as it can’t be done in npp the way I want it to be, as it stands.

[Mark Olson]

If you need to quickly navigate to the tags of an HTML document while ignoring whitespace, maybe a tree view would help. From a quick trip to Google, it seems like XMLNavigator might be a reasonable option, although it hasn’t been updated in a few years. I haven’t used it myself, but if it seems interesting to me I may try to fork and update it.