Re: Feature Request: git mv --after (new flag)

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <kostix@bswap.ru>
Date: Aug 4, 2025, 15:02 UTC
Message-ID: <hi7t3qk7difgzip7syscarnf5ui5avnhmjxil4vzurwcfo7a6x@drccf7gibn72>
In-Reply-To: <2f505f75-112a-4b71-bb05-ea0cb7731cd7@fmorschel.dev>

On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 02:05:32PM +0000, FMorschel wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> This is a request to add an –after mode to git mv command to explicitly 
> mark a filesystem rename after it has occurred (analogous to mercurial 
> => hg mv –after).
> 
> This would allow IDE/Language refactor renames/moves and would make sure 
> git still detects the moves correctly for keeping the correct commit 
> history.

Git does not track renames in the commits in creates, so, basically, if you have a file foo.txt under the Git's control, and do

  $ git mv foo.txt bar.txt
  $ git commit

The recorded commit will reference a tree object which will - compared to the tree object of the preceding commit - have an entry for bar.txt and not have an entry for foo.txt.

Hence a command like "git mv --after", if implemented, would be a pure syntactic sugar for "git rm <old_name> && git add <new_name>".