grommasdietz/kirby-hidden-characters

Kirby CMS plugin for visualising hidden characters in the Panel

2.1.0 2026-05-12 10:51 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.2
• getkirby/composer-installer: ^1.2

Requires (Dev)

• friendsofphp/php-cs-fixer: ^3.93
• phpunit/phpunit: ^12.5
• vimeo/psalm: ^6.15

MIT

• Grommas Dietz

• panel
• kirby
• kirby-plugin
• kirby-cms
• hidden-characters

README

Kirby CMS plugin to visually show hidden characters like spaces, soft hyphens, tabs, line breaks, or paragraph endings in focused writer, textarea, and text fields. The dimmed visual feedback is inspired by Adobe InDesign's hidden-characters mode, providing a familiar experience for content editors.

Legend

The plugin visualizes the following characters using a custom icon font:

Name	Unicode	Character	Description
Space	U+0020		Centered dot
Thin Space	U+2009		Centered dot with chevron above
No-Break Space	U+00A0		Centered dot with inverted chevron below
Narrow No-Break Space	U+202F		Centered dot with inverted chevron above
Em Space	U+2003		Centered dot with em dash below
En Space	U+2002		Centered dot with en dash below
Three-Per-Em Space	U+2004		Centered dot with large dot above
Four-Per-Em Space	U+2005		Centered dot with large dot below
Six-Per-Em Space	U+2006		Centered dot with same-sized dot below
Hair Space	U+200A		Centered dot with two small dots above
Punctuation Space	U+2008		Centered dot with dot below and vertical stroke above
Figure Space	U+2007		Centered dot inside number sign
Medium Mathematical Space	U+205F		Centered dot with negation sign above
Zero-Width Space	U+200B		Dashed vertical stroke
Soft Hyphen	U+00AD		Vertical stroke indicating possible hyphenation
Tab	U+0009		Two rightward arrows spanning the tab stop width
Line Break	U+000A		Negation sign representing hard line break
Paragraph End			Pilcrow sign representing the end of a paragraph
Story End			Number sign representing the end of the entire text block

Soft hyphens, tabulators, line breaks and paragraph endings are only rendered in writer and textarea, not on single-line <input> elements.

Requirements

• Kirby 5+
• PHP 8.2+

Installation

composer require grommasdietz/kirby-hidden-characters

Tip

If you don’t use Composer, you can download this repository and copy it to site/plugins/kirby-hidden-characters.

Quickstart

This plugin works out of the box with no configuration required.

Configuration

Developers building Panel plugins can register additional field components as overlay targets or customize the overlay element before insertion via the JavaScript extension API. See Extension API for details.

Documentation

Full reference for usage, contributions and maintenance lives in documentation.

Credits

The overlaying logic is adapted from Kirby Soft Hyphens plugin by @hansipete. Thank you!

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md for version history and changes.

Security

See SECURITY.md for security policies and reporting vulnerabilities.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidance and expectations.

License

MIT © 2024 Grommas Dietz