What is the meaning of these red bars in git file difference

Question

There is a red bar after + sign. What is this ?

Answer 1

Potentially bad indentation. You may have used tabs when you configured Git to prefer spaces, or vice-versa.

Check git config core.whitespace; it might contain tab-in-indent, space-before-tab, or indent-with-non-tab. You should change it to suit your preferences if this isn’t really a mistake.

Answer 2

Here are the possible values for the core.whitespace.
Your configuration value will be one of the tabs value below

core.whitespace

A comma separated list of common whitespace problems to notice.
git diff will use color.diff.whitespace to highlight them, and git apply
--whitespace=error will consider them as errors.
You can prefix - to disable any of them (e.g. -trailing-space):

• blank-at-eol

  treats trailing whitespaces at the end of the line as an error (enabled by default).

• space-before-tab###

  treats a space character that appears immediately before a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (enabled by default).

• indent-with-non-tab

  treats a line that is indented with space characters instead of the equivalent tabs as an error (not enabled by default).

• tab-in-indent

  treats a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (not enabled by default).

• blank-at-eof

  treats blank lines added at the end of file as an error (enabled by default).

• trailing-space

  a short-hand to cover both blank-at-eol and blank-at-eof.

• cr-at-eol

  treats a carriage-return at the end of line as part of the line terminator, i.e. with it, trailing-space does not trigger if the character before such a carriage-return is not a whitespace (not enabled by default).

• tabwidth=n

  tells how many character positions a tab occupies; this is relevant for indent-with-non-tab and when Git fixes tab-in-indent errors. The default tab width is 8. Allowed values are 1 to 63.

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Sample for output when tabs are uses as the configuration value: