How to hide columns like the way we hide rows?
-
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…?
-
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> -
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> -
@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.
-
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.
