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At work we are several developers and don't have a code style guide, and some developers indent with tabs, and some others with 4 spaces (luckily noone of the indent with spaces people uses different than 4 spaces). In general this is no (big) problem because in our editors we set tabwidth=4 and all the indentation seems correct.

But in git diff or git show that's what appears:

diff --git a/mesclatabs.php b/mesclatabs.php new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1986c91 --- /dev/null +++ b/mesclatabs.php @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +<?php +function foo() { + echo "line with 1 tab\n"; + echo "line with 4 spaces\n"; +}

The problem is git diff or git show where each tabs appears as wide as 8 spaces (well, in reality appears as a tab, and the shell (bash in my case) is showing the tab as 8 spaces. I suppose there must be some bash config to change this, but I'd like to know if git has an option to output tabs as 4 spaces in diff / show, as some developers work with zsh instead of bash.

Any ideas?

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  • 8
    in an ideal world the devs would all use spaces and you won't have silly issues like this. Commented May 14, 2012 at 10:38
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    I completely disagree. Why would you represent something with 4 characters when you can represent it with 8? Commented May 24, 2013 at 14:59
  • Of course I don't know your situation, but I would really push for some super-basic coding guidelines, maybe just about the tabs/spaces. No tabs sounds like a good idea, because then people tend to use tabs to align their comments and such, too, and it becomes a mess... And inserting tabs after spaces... It's confusing when I go to edit and I can't see what's a tab and what's a space (so I always make tabs visible in my editor). I'm a bit neurotic about it, though, so </opinion> Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 18:42
  • 1
    Also, I think it's possible to use (only) tabs consistently for indenting code, and spaces for any other alignment, and then people can change the tabstop to whatever they want. I can't imagine people being consistent enough, though! Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 18:43
  • @MatthewG 8 sounds a lot grander than my 2... Thank you for showing me the light! :D Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 18:44

3 Answers 3

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

References:

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The argument to less should be -x5 because the +/- symbols of the unified diff don't impact the location of the tab-stop, but they do push all the spaces one character to the right. A tab-stop of 5 aligns everything properly.
@ZhengKai: Just as a data point, I have less aliased as less -R, core.pager defined as above, and I run git diff --color-words -- everything works fine and the tab width is correct. Maybe that helps?
When I do git add -p the pager is not used and the tab displayed in wrong way. If you describe how to fix this too. then the answer will be full
@IanRogers - For colour escape sequences you'd want to use less -R / --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS linux.die.net/man/1/less
For those wondering, in -x1,5 the 1 is for the leading column in the diff output (that contains +, - and a space). Subsequent tabs then jump to columns 5, 9, 13, 17, etc - aka 1 + multiples of 4. So, for git diff the right argument is definitely -x1,5. People claiming above that -x5 works for them ... well - that's a tab width of 5 spaces without a leading column, hmm. Unlikely?
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On MacOS you could do

$ git config --global core.pager 'less --tabs 4'

-x/--tabs is the same option I prefer to use full ones. From man less

-xn,... or --tabs=n,...
Sets tab stops. If only one n is specified, tab stops are set at multiples of n. If multiple values separated by commas are speci- fied, tab stops are set at those positions, and then continue with the same spacing as the last two. For example, -x9,17 will set tabs at positions 9, 17, 25, 33, etc. The default for n is 8.

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As the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/10584237/1850340 did not work for me because of my color settings I came up with following solution:

TAB=$'\t' && git config --global core.pager "sed 's/$TAB/ /g' | less" && unset TAB

This replaces all tab characters with 4 spaces before displaying it with less. (The TAB workaround is needed to circumvent the shells backslash escape)

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I'm not on something I can test with, but would this be where less -R would come into play? to allow the ANSI colour escape sequences through, opposed to less -r?

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