Ever opened a pull request and found hundreds of changed lines that were mostly just spaces? GitHub now lets you save your whitespace preference across pull requests, so you don’t have to reset it every time.
The change arrived on October 22, 2026. It is small, but useful if you regularly review code after a formatter, indentation change, or cleanup commit.
Set it once
- Open any pull request on GitHub.
- Choose the Files changed tab.
- Open Settings → Whitespace changes.
- Choose Always hide to ignore whitespace-only differences by default, or Always show to keep them visible.
There is also a third choice: Hide for this diff only. Use that when one pull request is noisy but you don’t want to change your saved setting.
Need to see the spaces again?
When whitespace is hidden, GitHub shows an active Hide whitespace filter next to All commits. Select its X to temporarily display those differences again.
That temporary action does not overwrite your personal preference. GitHub also updates the visible file counts and diff statistics to match the filtered view.
Split view got a cleanup too
Previously, newly added or deleted files could waste horizontal space in split view. GitHub now gives those files the full width of both columns, like unified view.
That means fewer awkwardly wrapped lines when you’re reviewing a new configuration file, a long README, or a large deleted file.
One important catch
Hiding whitespace is a review filter, not a code change. It does not fix formatting problems or modify the pull request. And whitespace can matter in Python, YAML, Markdown, and other contexts—so switch it back on when indentation or formatting is part of the bug.
Quick takeaway: If you review lots of pull requests, choose Always hide for less noise, then reveal whitespace whenever the details matter.