If one has made a minor mistake to formatting, say indenting a line that does not need to be indented, is there a way to not have this in the commit history.
For example using git diff I can see ...
- const getUniqueUserID = require('./websocket-user-id');
+const getUniqueUserID = require('./websocket-user-id');
which might be annoying to see in the commit history. Is this indeed just a change of 2 spaces, the formatting is hard to read.
Should I just commit this space fix with another more substantial fix?
Are you concerned about there being an extra commit, or are you concerned with the diff being less useful?
You can use -b and -w (--ignore-space-change and --ignore-all-space) to minimize the diff, but a commit is a commit and if it's a part of the history it would be more confusing to hide it.
I tend to think it's not a big deal to make a small well-described change, even if it's whitespace-only.