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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

You answered your own question. Git blame is a pretty crappy tool but it's a tool that a lot of people use nevertheless. If you have a commit that converts tabs to spaces, then the blame for pretty much every single line will be lost before that point.

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Does Git not offer a way to view the blame from an earlier version? This would let you skip past the wall.

My company has a web tool for browsing the repo that allows this. It’s still inferior to Perforce timelapse view. But it’s not a hard blocker.

Yea, you just have to checkout the version of that file from before the white spaces commit. Then run git blame on it.

    git blame WS_COMMIT^ -- FILE

You’ll need to change the file name, though, if it’s been renamed since the whitespace change.

yes of course, instead of git blame HEAD file you just specify whichever ref you want

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