Why is a whole line highlighted and not just characters on the line?

When i highlight one or more lines in the code editor the whole line gets highlighted.
This is very annoying for empty lines or with lines containing only whitespace characters.

If a line contains three whitespace characters the highlighting should be only three characters long.
If a line contains no characters there should be no highlighting on that line (in case I mark several lines some of which contain no characters).

Is it possible to configure IntelliJ to highlight only characters (including whitespace characters) and not entire lines?