Realigning the values causes all of the lines to change in a line-by-line diff (e.g. as displayed by git diff). It also makes "git blame" less helpful, since every realigned line appears to originate from the alignment commit.

I agree -- but I'd think the work-around would be to do whitespace-insensitvie diffs? Which would probably be a good idea if the codebase uses indentation like this?

See eg: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7310033/how-to-make-git-...

`git blame -w` to ignore whitespace. There are other good options (like `-M`, ignore moved lines) available in the documentation.

I really wish GitHub would show me all diffs with `-w` by default, with a switch to turn it off...

Adding a query parameter of w=1 to a github page with a diff will ignore whitespace changes.

Yep, but I end up sticking that parameter on to a lot of URLs, so I'd like that to happen for every time I view a diff.