trailing-shade.vim

Highlight trailing whitespace with a shade of the current background color, so it always looks natural, regardless of a color scheme you're using. With a dark background (:h background), the highlighting has a lighter shade, and with a light background, the highlighting has a darker shade.

The offsets of ctermbg and guibg colors in the Normal highlight group are used as a shade of the background color.

By default, highlighting works only with listed buffers (:h buflisted), so trailing whitespace won't be visible in help files or some plugin buffers.

How it looks

Installation

Use string 'shrpnsld/trailing-shade.vim' with your plugin manager and you're good to go.

Confuguration

Set color offsets

Shade offset for TUI colors (:h tui-colors). The range for this option is typically within 0..255.

let g:trailing_shade_cterm = 8

Shade offset for GUI colors (:h gui-colors). The format for this option is 0xRRGGBB.

let g:trailing_shade_gui = 0x363636

Other options

While in Insert mode, highlight trailing whitespace occurring only after the cursor.

let g:trailing_shade_after_cursor = 1

Note for lazy.nvim users

These options should be set within the init function when listing trailing-shade inside the lazy.nvim setup:

require("lazy").setup {
    { "shrpnsld/trailing-shade.vim",
        init = function()
            vim.g.trailing_shade_gui = 0x563636,
        end },
}

Commands

:TrailingShadeOn – turn on for all buffers.

:TrailingShadeOff – turn off for all buffers.

:TrailingShadeOnHere – turn on for current buffer.

:TrailingShadeOffHere – turn off for current buffer.