Persist "Hide whitespace" preference across PRs

[madisonscott]

Select Topic Area

Product Feedback

Body

Hey team, thanks for all your hard work!

What are your thoughts on persisting the "Hide whitespace" preference in diff view settings across PRs, as the Unified/Split preference is persisted? I pretty much turn "Hide whitespace" on for every diff I look at, so it'd be nice to only ever do that once :)

Upon searching for similar discussions, I found an older thread that mentioned that this setting is intended to store your preference per-diff. To maintain that functionality, "Hide whitespace" could be added as a user-level setting, defaulting to that value when looking at a PR for the fist time, then still allowing it to be set a t a per-diff level on the diff itself.

Thanks for considering!

[alexander-dermicus]

Note that this proposal already has a lot of support in the older thread: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/5486

[EskeRahn]

Personally I believe it would be even better if it was possible to set per filetype, as not ALL filetypes has whitespaces as pure cosmetics.

But ignoring whitespaces should also be coupled with not seeing solo { and } with a particular indentation as a good match for synchronisation. that causes bad syncs for e.g. C# and similar.

[ardicoetzee]

Yes, please add this, at least on a per-user level.

[mlafleur]

At a minimum, the "Show Whitespace" toolbar button should always be visible. It shouldn't be markedly easier to show whitespace than to hide it.

[cupcakearmy]

Reviewing code is a BIG part of the time i spend on github. Hiding whitespace is such a vital feature, i don't unterstand how this cannot be a priority. You already have the functionality, just persist it 🙏

[NicholasMTElliott]

My workflow literally involves manually turning on this flag on every single PR I do, because the vast majority of files I review the white-space does not matter.

[patrickholley-asurion]

It's amazing that a website literally for computer programmers can cause so much disruption in a programmer's flow. Please add this as a persistent option, it is annoying and slows me down having to check it every time.

[Rylab]

One more vote to please oh please make this a persistent user-level (and/or repo-level) setting! It's quite rare that whitespace changes matter in our workflows; swapping the default to ignore it, would save so much time.

[ardicoetzee]

A friend directed me to this as an interim solution: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/git-well-soon/ehpeaofieafibmhiagianfjjblpnmbdo

I.e. A chrome plugin that does exactly what we want!

[alexander-dermicus]

Great workaround! Thanks for sharing!

[atkeranov]

A dev could literally implement this in a day at max. Now imagine how many human work hours are wasted by developers coming here to read through this thread, vote, and comment.

[johngallagher]

Please implement this. The previous thread has many comments. I heard devs complaining about this 3 years ago. It's 2024 and you have the backing of Microsoft. Please implement this.

[nelsondude]

This would be amazing to have! How can we get this feature prioritized? I find myself reviewing large PRs way too often, only to realize that its 95% whitespace changes. My company has strict policies on chrome extensions so that is not a viable option unfortunately.

[rgallagherab]

+1 on request for this user-level setting to be added.

[erorcodes]

This is one of the most annoying daily things I do (and that says a LOT) so please please prioritize 🙏

[armadsen]

Yet another request for this. I've written my own AppleScript to add ?w=1 to the URL with a keyboard shortcut in Safari, but it sure would be nice if persisting this were a GitHub feature.

(AppleScript below if anyone wants it. I use the excellent FastScripts to give it a keyboard shortcut.)

tell application "Safari"
	set currentDoc to front document
	set theWindow to window 1 where its document is currentDoc
	tell (current tab of theWindow)
		set URL to URL & "?w=1"
	end tell
end tell

[taurus227]

Another workaround is to use the Requestly browser extension to automatically add ?w=1 to the end of the relevant github.com URLs.

Here's my rule file that can be Imported into Requestly:

[
    {
        "creationDate": 1586890092492,
        "description": "Hide whitespace changes",
        "groupId": "",
        "id": "QueryParam_1586890092492",
        "isSample": false,
        "name": "Whitespace",
        "objectType": "rule",
        "pairs": [
            {
                "modifications": [
                    {
                        "actionWhenParamExists": "Overwrite",
                        "param": "w",
                        "type": "Add",
                        "value": "1"
                    }
                ],
                "source": {
                    "filters": {},
                    "key": "Url",
                    "operator": "Wildcard_Matches",
                    "value": "*github.com/*/files*"
                }
            },
            {
                "modifications": [
                    {
                        "actionWhenParamExists": "Overwrite",
                        "param": "w",
                        "type": "Add",
                        "value": "1"
                    }
                ],
                "source": {
                    "filters": {},
                    "key": "Url",
                    "operator": "Wildcard_Matches",
                    "value": "*github.com/*/files/*..*"
                }
            },{
                "modifications": [
                    {
                        "actionWhenParamExists": "Overwrite",
                        "param": "w",
                        "type": "Add",
                        "value": "1"
                    }
                ],
                "source": {
                    "filters": {},
                    "key": "Url",
                    "operator": "Wildcard_Matches",
                    "value": "*github.com/*/commits/*"
                }
            },
            {
                "modifications": [
                    {
                        "actionWhenParamExists": "Overwrite",
                        "param": "w",
                        "type": "Add",
                        "value": "1"
                    }
                ],
                "source": {
                    "filters": {},
                    "key": "Url",
                    "operator": "Wildcard_Matches",
                    "value": "*github.com/*/commit/*"
                }
            },
            {
                "modifications": [
                    {
                        "actionWhenParamExists": "Overwrite",
                        "param": "w",
                        "type": "Add",
                        "value": "1"
                    }
                ],
                "source": {
                    "filters": {},
                    "key": "Url",
                    "operator": "Wildcard_Matches",
                    "value": "*github.com/*/compare/*"
                }
            }
        ],
        "ruleType": "QueryParam",
        "status": "Active"
    }
]

[madisonscott]

Thanks for sharing! This feels safer to me than the other extension going around :)