🔗 Use 'git mv' to record filename case changes in Git

After my previous post Tracking renamed files in Git, here’s another entry in my ongoing series “I thought git mv was useless but I was wrong”.

This one’s especially relevant to users on macOS and Windows, where the file system is case-insensitive by default. More precisely, APFS on macOS is case-insensitive but case-preserving by default. That is, A.TXT and a.txt refer to the same file (and these two cannot coexist in the same directory), but the file system records the filename exactly as you entered it.

If you’re on a such a file system and change the case of a filename, Git will not record the new name — unless you use git mv to perform the renaming.