morsdyce/preserving-history.md

## preserving-history.md

      
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              preserving-history.md
            
          
    Did you know...

...that git lets you move and rename whole directories while preserving the git history of those files?
If you run
git read-tree --prefix=$NEW_PATH -u master:$OLD_PATH
rm -rf $OLD_PATH
# ...you probably want to change some imports...
git commit -m $MESSAGE
that will move the directory tree to the new location,
and, when you commit, it'll preserve this history of those files.
Things that still work:

git blame
git merge with code that branched off before the renaming (incredible!)

you may have to set merge.renamelimit to something higher for this to work, i.e.
git config merge.renamelimit 4000