Sublime Text 3 - whitespace color wrong after update - colors

Question

So I've updated Sublime Text 3 to version 3170 on Ubuntu today and apparently this broke my whitespace coloring - I always have this option set:
draw_white_space": "all"
because I like seeing my spaces and tabs in dark grey - not distracting, but visible enough to be able to see/count them or locate tabs that should be spaces instead.
After the update, the whitespaces are light green, which makes them super distracting. Is there any way to set this back to grey?

Answer 1

One of the features of Stable build 3170 (and many of the Dev builds in this series) is support for invisibles in the tmTheme color scheme as well as in the new sublime-color-scheme format. This is something that existed in tmTheme prior to this, but Sublime did not use the value in that color scheme key and instead used another color.
At the moment it's unclear exactly what color was originally used, but possibly it was the foreground color with an alpha value applied to "dim" it, so the following may require some experimentation to find the right color.
A side effect of this change is that for some color schemes, the color scheme author may have had a value in the invisibles key that was not honoured previously but which now is, which makes things display incorrectly. Or correctly, depending on how you look at it.
You mentioned in comments above that you're using Neon Color Scheme and in that scheme the invisibles value is set to #06FF05 which is indeed a green color.
In order to solve your problem you need to edit the color scheme to apply a different color to that part of the color scheme to get the gray color that you want.
The easiest way to accomplish this would be to take advantage of the addition of the sublime-color-scheme resource type in Sublime Text. Many resource types in Sublime "stack" together at load time to allow for the creation of a partial override.
It turns out that in the case of this particular file format, sublime-color-scheme stacks with tmTheme files of the same base name, since they are represented the same way in memory once they're loaded.
As a result of that, you can adjust the invisibles color by creating a file with the name Neon.sublime-color-scheme in your User package with the following contents:
{
"globals":
{
"invisibles": "#FF00FF"
}
}
The Neon.sublime-color-scheme stacks with the Neon.tmTheme from the package, and since the User package content is always loaded last, this overrides just the invisibles color (in this case to magenta) but leaves the rest of the color scheme untouched.
This of course applies to any color scheme so long as you know the name of the tmTheme file that you're using. The same mechanism can be used to extend your theme to include colors for new scopes or alter the colors of existing scopes without having to recreate a whole new tmTheme or sublime-color-scheme file. See the color scheme documentation for more information.
Doing this creates a partial override, which means that regardless of the content of the underlying color scheme, your changes will still take effect with no overt warning. In this case that's pretty low key as far as potential problems are concerned.
Another way to accomplish this goal is to make changes to the tmTheme file by creating an override. This is marginally more complicated than the above but potentially still useful. For example, this can be used for any package resource of any type in order to modify things to your liking.
In order to create such an override:
Install PackageResourceViewer if you don't already have it installed.
Enter prvo in the command palette and select PackageResourceViewer: Open Resource
Select Neon Color Scheme, then Neon.tmTheme (or the appropriate package and file, depending on what you're doing)
Make appropriate changes to the file as desired and save
This sequence of steps opens the underlying package resource file for you to look at and/or modify. Saving the file creates an override by creating a folder in the Packages folder named for the package and putting the modified file inside. When Sublime loads package resources, the version that's unpacked in the Packages folder takes precedence over the version that's in the package.
In the case of a color scheme tmTheme file, near the top you'll see a settings key, and inside of it, this set of tags sets the color used for invisibles, which you can modify as you see fit.
<key>invisibles</key>
<string>#06FF05</string>
As with any override, once you do this your version of the color scheme (or any other package reaource) will supersede the version that ships with the package, which means that if the package gets updated, your version of the file will still be used without any warnings or messages to tell you that it's happening.
That's probably not a big deal for a color scheme; the OverrideAudit package will warn you if this happens if you're worried. Alternatively, you can make the modifications as above but do a Save As instead of a Save and save the file in your User package, and then alter the color scheme setting to use that version of the color scheme instead.
If you do that and use the same file name, the scheme will appear twice in the color scheme selector; make sure you choose the version that says it's in the User package to be sure you're using your modified version.

Answer 2

Customize your color scheme's whitespace setting:
Sublime Text > Preferences > Customize Color Scheme
{
"globals": {
"invisibles": rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.15)
}
}
No plugins necessary (:
Sublime Theme Customizing Docs here