How to change tab width in git diff?

git whitespace git-diff
Jeff Puckett picture Jeff Puckett · Sep 6, 2016 · Viewed 7.5k times · Source

The standard spacing for a tab is 8 characters.

I prefer to view that as 4 characters in my editors and console. I can easily change this default behavior on console with the tabs command:

tabs -4

However, when using git diff or git show it displays in the default 8 character tab whitespace.

How can I get git diff to render tabs as 4 character spaces?

Answer

blue112 picture blue112 · Sep 6, 2016

This actually has nothing to do with git diff.

git diff actually renders a tab, which is later converted by your terminal emulators (for instance, gnome-terminal) to spaces.

Go to the preference of your terminal emulator to change that setting.

Also, git may use a pager, so you might want to configure it like that:

git config --global core.pager 'less -x1,5'

More information here: setting tabwidth to 4 in git show / git diff

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