I’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu Jaunty – and therefore Gedit 2.26.1 – and I couldn’t figure out how to change the color of spaces shown by the ‘Draw Spaces’ plugin. This used to be set in the plugin configuration, but you now do it in the syntax highlighting theme – but how? What do you need to add?

The closest that I got googling was this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit-plugins/+bug/348500 – which almost tells you but misses out the crucial bit of info.

So, I asked the fine folks in the #gedit room on irc.gnome.org and they enlightened me; you need to add this to your syntax theme file:

<style name="draw-spaces" foreground="tinted_grey"/>

Where tinted_gray is one of your theme’s colours. I would put it at the top somewhere, with the rest of the global stuff. You can look in the cobalt.xml file in /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/styles for an example of a theme which does this. I thought I’d put this here so anyone else who get’s stuck trying to change this has a better chance of Googling an answer.

Download a modified version of the Gedit Twilight Theme, with this tweak added. To install, put the file into your ~/.gnome2/gedit/styles/ folder and restart Gedit. Then just select the Twilight theme in Preferences.