I have solely deleted a ton of lines in a really large file. When I stage and commit the changes to the file, Git's default diff algorithm thinks I've moved a bunch of things around instead of only deleting lines (the file has a lot of repetitive lines).
Here's my output from two different diff algorithms:
git diff --stat
1 file changed, 4373 insertions(+), 9192 deletions(-)
git diff --stat --minimal
1 file changed, 4819 deletions(-)
Is there a way that I can enter patch mode with the --minimal setting so that I can separate these into multiple commits for the purpose of reducing my perceived footprint on this file?
EDIT: Even after all of this effort to reduce my footprint, the diff across the multiple commits using the myers (default) algorithm still shows the insertions... I was hoping this would not happen, but now it seems that I have wasted a lot of time in exchange for learning something new about Git.
Apparently the patch mode uses your configured default diff algorithm. Updating my config with the following command gave me the desired results.
git config --global diff.algorithm minimal