The white space character in IAR Embedded (I specifically use STM8 variant, don't know their ARM tools) is the most intrusive, compared with any other IDE we use (and there are many of them). If you enable "show white space", then a very BIG UGLY \cdot character appears instead of every space character, which makes your source code impossible to read.
Some other IDEs have much smaller/nicer/less intrusive characters (we love the "single pixel" from Keil's uVision, that's brilliant!) and in some other you can customize it, by either changing the character, or changing the foreground color of white space to make it more "pale" (and less intrusive, like in Notepad++, or PN). This may or may not work in comments (where the white space char takes the color of the comment, which is not nice, but we don't care about comments). In some other cases (like Notepad++, where you can change the foreground but not the character) we were able (after some help from this very forum, thanks!) to replace the big-cdot white space character by playing some "scintilla tricks" with the configuration. We applied that to eclipse later, too, and we are happy about that :D
None of it would work for IAR-EW IDE. One can not change the whitespace symbol, not are they able to change its foreground color to gray it out or so. At least, not in a convenient way, or not to our knowledge. Being able to see the white space is essential for our work (no joke, this is not subjective caprice, it helps a lot when coding too, but we are more stressed about editing big blocks of data). If we can solve this issue, we may even buy the toys from IAR :P. Right now we are using a 14-days trial, and we like it more than the "silly IDE" offered by ST for free, except that in both cases we have to edit our important files in Notepad++, where we can see the white space and also have the advantage of block-editing and multi-line simultaneous typing, and later copy/paste them into IAR-EW, to compile and debug. IAR seems quite unresponsive about it.
So, does anyone knows and likes to tell us if it is possible to change this character, and if so, then how? Thanks in advance.
I don't know about STM version of EW, but in ARM version the color used for whitespace characters is the "Other" class.
That color seems to be shared with some other lesser used symbols such as some pragma values. So you probably don't want it turn it completely white-ish.