How do I display (view) all the invisible characters like space, tabs

and newlines in a file? You can set the ‘list’ option to see all the invisible characters in your file.

    :set list

With this option set, you can view space characters, tabs, newlines, trailing space characters and wrapped lines. To not display the invisible characters (which is the default), you have to reset the ‘list’ option:

    :set nolist

    (or)

    :set list!

The “:set list!” command will toggle the current setting of the boolean ‘list’ option. You can modify the ‘listchars’ option to configure how and which invisible characters are displayed. For example, with the following command all the trailing space characters will be displayed with a ‘.’ character.

    :set listchars=trail:.