Visual Studio: View full git commit history (including renames)

Question

I'm using Visual Studio 2015 and the Microsoft Git client. I'm running into some problems with viewing history and annotations with the tooling because Visual Studio doesn't seem to handle file renames when viewing git history. Is there any good way around this?

BTW: I tried using the "Show Full History" toolbutton in the history viewer, but it still didn't actually show history with renames

Here's what I did to test:

1. In Visual Studio, I right-clicked the file and selected "View History". (it only showed 4 commits)
2. In the History Window, I clicked "Show Full History" -- still the same 4 commits.
3. From the git command line, I ran git log --follow TheFile.cs (it produced 13 commits)
4. In Atlassian Source Tree, I pulled of the log for the file, and I checked the "Follow Renamed Files" option. It pulled the same 13 commits as the command line.

What I really want is to have an option in Visual Studio that would match. Is that possible?

Answer 1

Visual Studio does follow history between two commits to determine if a file is renamed. Here, I've renamed a single file from its original name to renamed, and made a change to the contents at the same time:

However, Git does not track changes between two commits - instead, it compares the snapshots of the commits to determine how files have changed. Thus, there is no rename information in the repository's history. Instead, this is calculated by comparing the file in the original commit to the file in the subsequent commit. If they are sufficiently similar, then Git will deem this a rename.

Since this is a heuristic, it's not guaranteed that this will be deemed to be a rename. However, Visual Studio and Git for Windows should agree on these things, generally speaking. I'd be curious why one reports this as a rename and the other does not. There are two possibilities:

1. This file is very near the edge of similarity - say, Git has decided that the two revisions are 61% similar to each other and are thus a rename, while Visual Studio has decided that the two revisions are merely 59% similar, and thus are not a rename.
2. There's some bug here where Visual Studio is not calculating the similarity correctly. If I had to guess, I would guess that there's a whitespace or line ending issue, because that's always a problem in Git.

If you're able to share the two revisions of this file, opening a connect bug or emailing them to me directly would help investigate further.