GitHub consistently maintains user-defined tab-width preferences [GA]

[moraesc]

Discussion Type

Product Feedback

Discussion Content

Historically, users on GitHub have been able to set their preferred tab width for viewing code, but this preference was not reliably respected throughout the site. Inconsistent tab rendering, especially in Markdown-rendered content (i.e., READMEs and discussions) led to code that looked different from what users expected. This made it harder to read and review. This also meant that project-defined tab widths weren’t always applied, further impacting the overall developer experience.

GitHub now applies user-defined tab width preferences consistently across the entire site. A global CSS update ensures that anywhere code is displayed, whether it’s in preformatted text, code blocks, or other Markdown-rendered contexts, the tab size will match the user’s setting from their account preferences. It’s important to note that this improvement only affects code that uses tab characters; code indented with spaces will continue to appear as before. The main impact will be seen in places like READMEs and discussions where Markdown content includes code blocks. This enables a more uniform and personalized code-viewing experience across GitHub.

[ravindUwU]

I see the code viewer on Gist honours the tab size preference as well, nice 😊! I've detailed a few things I think could be improved, below.

• The tab size preference would ideally be an indent size preference. Similarly, there'd ideally be an indent style (tabs/spaces) preference. Editors (not viewers) across GitHub and Gist (shown when creating/editing a file in a repo; and creating/editing a Gist) would default to this size and style, unless it's overriden by an applicable EditorConfig.

  • Gist always defaults to 2 spaces at the moment.
  • GitHub editors for new files always default to 2 spaces, even if the applicable EditorConfig specifies indent_style = tab.
  • GitHub editors for existing files correctly detect the indent style. But if the file is tab-indented, they always default to an indent size of 8, disregarding the indent size preference.

• When signed out, the tab size defaults to the browser default of 8. Understandable, because GitHub shouldn't force a specific indent size (wishing browsers had an indent size preference for monospaced fonts hehe). However, if one attempts to change this with a user style that sets tab-size: 4,

  • Tab-indented code blocks in rendered markdown adapt correctly because they're <pre>s.
  • Code viewers initially seem fine 👇 when viewing tab-indented code,
    
  • ...but "break" when a selection is made 👇 because the selectable text is indented with a size of 8 but the shown text is indented with tab-size,
    

[ioquatix]

I've been asking for this for years. Great to see it's finally implemented. Thanks!

[ioquatix]

When not logged in, the default should be the .editorconfig tab setting if possible.

[taylorkline]

When I make "Suggested Changes" and then submit a review, the post-review "Suggested Changes" box does not appear to respect my tab width.

[joeldrapper]

I'm so happy to hear this. 🙏

[chase-moskal]

i'm very happy about this feature — however, i discovered a github bug here: github is mangling codeblocks that are nested under list items, by inserting a leading space on every line. this breaks the code snippets.

i reproduced the issue here on this gist, which has more explanation: https://gist.github.com/chase-moskal/0714c9b5e974f99162774d24524a099a

if anybody could repost this in the appropriate bug reporting place, or forward it to the relevant developers, i would appreciate it. thanks.

[sil3nt544]

branches

[moraesc]

@chase-moskal thanks for reporting this! It looks like this bug was pre-existing so we've reported it to the owning team who has created an issue to implement a fix.