Question

How can I swap two files, keeping them marked so in the history?
(Except for doing it manually.)

I’d expect some flag for git mv, like,

git mv --swap foo.txt bar.txt

which would produce

# renamed:    foo.txt -> bar.txt
# renamed:    bar.txt -> foo.txt

Is there support for this in git?

Answer 1

Git doesn’t actually track renames, it just determines that heuristically based on the changes in content of a particular commit. If you do what you describe, you’ll likely see something like below but it depends on the files.

Modified: foo.txt
Renamed: foo.txt -> bar.txt