How to change tab width in git diff? [duplicate]

Question

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 1

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