Question

Suppose I only need to work on a single file. From the git-log man page, it seems like I should use –follow. What confuses me is that for –find-renames, I can specify the threshold on the similarity index, while there is no such threshold for –follow.

My question is why I do not need to specify a threshold for –follow to find renaming?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you specify a threshold with --find-renames, it will be applied when using --follow. But when you only specify --follow the default similarity index is used (which should be alright in most cases).

Follow requires rename detection to work, but rename detection itself is also useful for e.g. git show, git status, etc. I recommend enabling it by default using:

git config --global diff.renames true