Fold generated files in the diff, reviewer-side

[flazouh]

The pain

A large pull request is mostly generated files: lockfiles, snapshots, bundled output, *.pb.go, minified assets. They bury the ~30 files a reviewer actually needs to read, and GitHub has no reviewer-side switch to fold them away.

• community #186824 "Hide generated files in Files changed" — 32 upvotes (read 2026-08-31)
• Corroborated by the large-PR threads: #39341 (219), #33663 (175), which name generated files, snapshots and lockfiles as the noise.

GitHub can hide linguist-generated paths, but only if the repository author set .gitattributes. A reviewer on someone else's repository has no control.

Where GitQuiet is today

GitQuiet folds whitespace-only changes by default and folds unchanged context, but it draws every changed file in the tree and the diff, generated or not.

Proposed direction

• A reviewer-side group in the file tree for likely-generated paths (lockfiles, dist/, *.min.*, snapshots, *.generated.*, .gitattributes linguist-generated), foldable with one press and remembered per person.
• Keep the count visible so nothing is silently hidden; the group folds, it does not disappear.

Source: research/review-mode-pain-points.md §10 in gitquiet-notes.