Prevent git from treating delete & new file w/ changes as a move [duplicate]

Question

I'm using Git to track changes to XML configurations for virtual machines. Many of the XML configurations are similar, with just a few fields that are different. I often delete VM configurations and add new ones. When adding these changes to the repo, Git treats it as a file rename, with just a few changes. I could see why git would do this, and understand it's use case.

I'm wondering if there's a way to prevent that, and instead have git treat it as a file deletion with a new file creation instead. When looking at the commit logs, it would be much easier to discern "oh, looks like on this day I deleted this VM and created a new one"

Answer 1

Renames are only something shown in the output, internally they are stored just as regular deletions and creations.

If you want to disable the renames detection, you can use the --no-renames option:

git log --stat --no-renames

(also works with git diff, git show, etc.)

If you don't want to add this option all the time, you can add it to your config:

git config diff.renames false