setting tabwidth to 4 in git show / git diff

I believe git config --global core.pager 'less -x1,5'

References:

• Original: (No longer valid) git-scm chp7-1
• Newer:
  • git-config#git-config-corepager
  • Customizing Git

As the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/10584237/1850340 did not work for me because of my color settings I came up with following solution:

TAB=$'\t' && git config --global core.pager "sed 's/$TAB/    /g' | less" && unset TAB

This replaces all tab characters with 4 spaces before displaying it with less. (The TAB workaround is needed to circumvent the shells backslash escape)