Git, source code, spaces or tabs?

In a previous article, I talked about converting from TFS to Git and documented the normalization of the line endings in the converted Git repository. Another aspect of source code is whether spaces or tabs should be used.

In a previous article, I talked about converting from TFS to Git and documented the normalization of the line endings in the converted Git repository. Another aspect of source code is whether spaces or tabs should be used.

Again, I’m not going to argument in favor of one or the other, but just document how you can get a consistent setup for your team. This setup however is something that can’t be easily committed in the repository itself like it was done with the line ending configuration. The main reason are the scripts that need to be executed to make sure that any content is processed when checking out or into the repository.

Converting spaces to tabs

To get a good setup, use the same git attributes to process any file. In my repository, the C# code was indented with 4 spaces, while the XML files were indented with 2 spaces. If you want everything to be tabs, but you want to keep consistent indentation, you set up 2 filters in .git/config, one for each file type:

[filter "tabspace4"]
    clean = cat
    smudge = unexpand -t 4 --first-only
[filter "tabspace2"]
    clean = cat
    smudge = unexpand -t 2 --first-only

Our filters are defined, now we only have to make them active by adding the following to .git/info/attributes:

*.cs     filter=tabspace4
*.xml    filter=tabspace2

Similar to the line endings, git needs to reprocess all your files. This is done by clearing the working copy and getting a new set of working copy files:

user@host:MyComponent$ git rm --cached -r .
user@host:MyComponent$ git reset --hard
user@host:MyComponent$ git add .
user@host:MyComponent$ git commit -m "Introducing space to tab conversion"

This should transform all spaces to tabs in C# and XML files and commit the tabbed files to the git database.

Platform dependency

The filter definitions use the Unix unexpand command. This setup is not portable to Windows, neither will it work on Mac OS X as the standard unexpand is not real GNU unexpand. This means that every developer needs to have a different setup based on the tools available. This is very cumbersome.

Another option is EditorConfig. EditorConfig is a tool that can be plugged into a number of different editors and IDE’s and takes over your source file formatting regarding indentation and line endings. The source file formatting definition can be committed to the source code repository. Although not all developers will probably use the same editor, with the EditorConfig plugin installed the team will nevertheless have consistent source code formatting.