In Xcode4, can you change the characters used to display invisibles?

Question

I much prefer Visual Studio's way of displaying invisibles... a simple dot for spaces, and an arrow for tabs. When you change the color to be a light-light-gray, they provide excellent help when viewing code alignment and such but they're barely noticeable so you can leave them turned on all the time without really getting in the way.

Xcode4 however (and maybe other versions as well) instead display some truncated-'U' shape for a space and don't appear to show anything for a tab, Worse, as I mentioned in another post, Xcode doesn't respect its own setting for invisibles color.

Still, this question is about changing the default character used. I don't care if it's a hack of a plist file or even digging around in the contents of Xcode's app bundle (knowing any updates would revert it if it was) but as they are now, they're just too unusable because of how much they obstruct whitespace and thus skimming of code. (VS really nailed that.)

Answer 1

The only way (I could figure out) to do it is to find the symbol that it uses (note they change along with font) open the font in a font editor and copy paste the glyph you want to the one in spot occupied by the character you want to change. There are a few free editors and some really expensive ones I was able to use ttfedit http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/TTFEdit.shtml to find and change the character XCode used for spaces on one of the more silly fonts I have to make sure it worked before I answered. Saved font to desktop, double clicked and installed it, osx complains that it is duplicate font, say resolve differences and pick your new file and say resolve to turn off the old font. Next time you open xcode you should see your new symbol for space.

Probably another way to do this, but may be the only way without getting deep into XCode source to find where it makes decision for symbol to use (note many use white diamond but helvetica for instance uses a kinda floor bracket thing, you may see the pattern but I didn't).