Eclipse: I turned on hidden characters now I can't turn off

It is under Preferences > General > Editors > Text Editors. There is a checkbox labeled "Show whitespace characters". If you uncheck this the editor switches back to normal.

If you click on the "whitespace characters" link in this line you will get a popup window, in which you can define which characters eclipse is supposed to consider as whitespace characters.

In this popup window you also get the option to define the transparency in which each whitespace character is displayed in the editor, which you can use to (indirectly) change their foreground colour. I'm just mentioning it here, because it took me about half an hour to find this setting! ;-)

I am using Eclipse Oxygen and can see this option to toggle whitespace characters:

Since this is not a standard setting, it could be the result of one of your extra plugin.

• Did you try starting your eclipse with the -clean parameter?
• Do you reproduce the issue with a fresh Eclipse installation?

You can add "Show Whitespace Characters" button in toolbar by customizing your perspective. It also contains buttons to toggle word wrap, and toggle selection mode.

Go to Window > Perspective > Customize Perspective > Action Set Availability, then select "Editor Presentation" action set:

This works in Eclipse Neon.

You can also add a key binding for this action. Go to Preferences > General > Keys > "Show Whitespace Characters"

Sorry this is a bit vague but it's a while since i used Eclipse and i do not have it installed. I think this is it ..... in one of the menus you will find the Eclipse settings, there are two set's of settings, current project and overall Eclipse, you mat need to check them both. In there are various menus in tree form that allow you control the actions and look and feel. But some of them are nested so there is an overall control but some packages have their own options in a sub menu set. The menu's will expand when you click them and i'm afraid you need to walk through them all.