Question

While doing some refactoring, I renamed a variable from oldName to newName. Is there a way to tell the git diff command to ignore differences where oldName is now newName? I want to do this to focus in on only the other non-trivial changes. If this is possible, can I also specify more than one variable renaming to ignore, e.g., ignore changes from oldName1 to newName1 and from oldName2 to newName2 … ?

Answer 1

He is very correct, but of course you can grep the output of diff. Not the same thing, but depending on the magnitude of the change, perhaps usable.

git diff | egrep -v 'oldName|newName' | egrep '^[+-]'

In general, you should try to have your commits be one commit per concept. You can also split your pre-commits using git add -p.