diff view too narrow

When viewing diffs, it would be good if the text is displayed on 100% of the window width. Not everyone uses 80 column-width standard and viewing diffs is painful.

This is extra painful in the side-by-side diff view since it does not support horizontal scrolling.

Also... using a % width instead of absolute px width has the added benefit that changing the zoom level allows more code to be visible.

I think the main issue is that GitLab has a max-width view area for the entire UI. If we try to change this it's going to look funny because the diff will be outside the bounds of the rest of page. What about a button to pop the diff into another window as in "fullscreen" mode?

+1 for the fullscreen diff

I suppose fullscreen could work as a workaround... In the fullscreen view I would still prefer it if you use %-based width since it will allow me to use zoom to see more text if needed. 95% or something is probably better than 100% since the add comment icon doesn't fit when 100%. Side-scrolling would also be nice to have, there is a ticket for that already tough ( #182 (closed) ).

Fixing the UI to support different widths for the menu ("house" Files Commits Network...) and the actual content is probably the "proper way" since that is the only thing that looks odd when I manually change the with to 95% (for the "container" class ) If this is too much work then fullscreen is good enough. Will there be fullscreen options for all manner of code viewing or just the normal diff view the side-by-side diff view... generally the width-problem applies to everywhere where the user looks at code.

Side by side view is useless without the possibility of using more of the screen. 2/3 of the width of my windows is just white background and the side-by-side diff has room for only one one of the diffed files. (I would vote, If I knew how)

We definitely have this problem as well.

Maybe we should consider using a third party code viewing library like https://github.com/codemirror/CodeMirror

At the risk of being yet another "mee too!" - The side-by-side diff view is mostly unworkable here. I'm pretty comfortable with expanding all the UI to use the full page width, but I could understand why some might not want this. I don't think it's impossible to separate the main "list-view" elements from the diff-view w/r page layout.

Certainly I don't think expanding the "header" and "nav-bar" elements to full width would give anyone any problems (Infact this would look much better, IMHO for the "header" bar).

for a workaround on safari, I use the "Quickstyle" extension, then I added the rule:

DIV.container

width:90%;
min_width:1000px;

This makes many things in gitlab, including side-by-side view, look nicer on my ultrawide LCD when maximized.

Here's what it looks like:

On our omnibus installation, we've just modified the css (/opt/gitlab/embedded/service/gitlab-rails/public/assets/application-*.css[.gz]) to specify the same setting Jean-François is using (width:90%), without any unwanted side effects. Whenever we upgrade, we just tack on that modification to our list of post-upgrade steps. It has been a suitable workaround so far.

I just tried the same thing as Jean-François, but manually applied in Chrome. The results are similar and a big improvement on the original. There's still about an inch margin on either side (on a 24" screen), but it's definitely "better".

Other features of native GUI diff-tools like having the two sides match widths at the start, being able to explicitly position the border between them and having the horizontal-scrolling match are worth adding to the wishlist too (But I imagine this would be pretty finnicky to implement in a web UI).

After a long time I am pleased to say that the next release will address this issue. GitLab has slightly modified the layout to be more fluid. Thus, side-by-side diffs will use the full width of the page view area. Grab a development copy to test this change. Otherwise, look for the GitLab release in January.

Fixed in dc24b4d7

Status changed to closed

mentioned in commit 06afaa91

mentioned in merge request !14785