In Vim can you stop the color change of white space characters with 'set cursorline' on?

Question

In this Vim screenshot you can see that when moving the cursor over a line it changes the normal color of the whitespace characters (shown on the left) from grey to black. Can I stop this and leave them showing grey always, regardless of cursor position?

I've tried setting these in the colour scheme but no luck:

hi SpecialKey  guibg=bg  guifg=#CCCCCC gui=none
hi NonText     guibg=bg  guifg=#CCCCCC gui=none

Answer 1

You can use :match to highlight the tabs.

:match NonText '^\s\+'

That seems to override the cursor line. It would be better of course to use matchadd() but it seems to be overriden by the cursor line. There might be a way to make it work

Answer 2

Following lines in .vimrc fixed the problem for me.

au VimEnter * call matchadd('SpecialKey', '^\s\+', -1)
au VimEnter * call matchadd('SpecialKey', '\s\+$', -1)

It overrides other styles application for tabs and trailing spaces inside a cursor line.