pre { tab-size: 4 }

[Rich-Harris]

For some unfathomable reason, browsers render tabs as 8 spaces. Even among the minority of developers who agree that tabs > spaces, I've yet to find anyone who thinks that makes sense.

Happily, most browsers allow you to set the tab width with the CSS tab-size property. Adding something like the following to the CSS used on github.com and gist.github.com would make code previews much more readable:

pre {
  -moz-tab-size: 4;
  tab-size: 4;
}

[nschonni]

👍 I find it annoying too. I reached out to GitHub about this when they decided to drop tab characters entirely (now restored). The hack they shared was to add ?ts=4 to the URL to override the value. EX https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew/blob/master/Gruntfile.coffee?ts=4

[Rich-Harris]

@nschonni Thanks, didn't know that. Weird that they'd implement that but not have a sensible default! Also, it doesn't work on gist.github.com sadly

[nschonni]

Not to hijack the request, but it would be nice to be able to set your preference in your user profile or by project

[rlidwka]

it would be nice to be able to set your preference in your user profile or by project

+1

[Rich-Harris]

From GitHub:

Hi Rich,

Thanks for your feedback! We're always working to improve GitHub and we consider every suggestion we receive. I've added your idea about changing the tab spacing on GitHub to four to our internal Feature Request List.

We can't say if/when we may add a feature, however your feedback has definitely been recorded.

Cheers,
Steven!

[tobiasvl]

👍

[bevacqua]

👍

[sindresorhus]

I suggested this in early april and got this response from GitHub:

Would you mind adding tab-size: 4; to your
pre {} rule? It makes tab sized indentation
have sane indentation (4 char instead of 8)
in diff views.

We have discussed this many times but we find 8 to be the safest option. Some browsers only support the default, which is 8. Also, changing the default would break repositories that mix spaces and tabs, like ruby/ruby for example.

We haven’t given up on this though. We still want to find a solution, but we need to find a solution that fixes this without creating new problems.

[bkeepers]

We actually do use tab-size in CSS now, but it's still 8 because people get 😠 when you change stuff like that on them.

I just proposed to the team that we persist the ?ts=4 param per-user. So you only have to visit it once and it changes it for you forever. I haven't fully thought through the idea, so maybe it's a horrible idea. But we'll see what the consensus is.

[Rich-Harris]

@bkeepers That sounds to me like a winning solution - grants all the customisability without having to crowbar in extra complexity to the account settings page. Fingers crossed your colleagues go for it. Thanks!

[sindresorhus]

We actually do use tab-size in CSS now, but it's still 8 because people get 😠 when you change stuff like that on them.

Even if it's a good change that most will want? As an example, Facebook has changed their design a lot, people got angry, but in the end everyone got used to it, and most even found it better. Just saying.

[bkeepers]

Even if it's a good change that most will want?

I'm all for changing it then, but we don't really have an easy way to quantify that besides gut feeling. We could take time to research it, but honestly I would rather just make ts sticky and move on to something more productive.

[nschonni]

The way to quantify would be the feedback you received last time you completely replaced tabs with spaces in the diffs and the feedback that got 😉

[tj]

big +1 to changing this it looks ridiculous right now