My goal were to somehow make visible, if a whitespace is space, tab, or even newline (and, ideally, in case of newline I would be happy to see \r\n and \n differently).I am thinking to a similar thing as the GUI text editors can do.Is it somehow with vim also possible?
How to differentiate visually the white spaces in vim?
whitespace
Yes, look at :help listchars.listchars is a string that will be parsed when list is set to determine what to render for certain special characters. You can set listchars in your .vimrc like so:set listchars=eol:!,tab:>=,trail:.set listThis will use the ! character to show the end of every line, tabs like >=== (assuming four-space tabs), and trailing spaces with a . character. The characters are highlighted with the SpecialKey group.In addition, you can include the following tokens in listchars:extends:<character> for the last character in a long lineprecedes:<character> for the first character in a long lineconceal:<character> for concealed text nbsp:<character> for non-breaking spacesNote that you cannot get vim to display visible whitespace for spaces that are not trailing without a relatively modern version of vim; check if has(patch710) to see if space is supported in listchars.