Converting file (tracked with Git) from Java to Kotlin in Android Studio

Question

A conversion from Java to Kotlin in Android Studio 2.3.2 (in 3.0 the same behaviour) creates a new file and deletes previous. So Git doesn\'t know anything about this conversion

Answer 1

Git guesses renames from added/removed file pairs, but only if these files are close enough, i.e. if the file was renamed with no or small amount of changes.

When you apply java-to-kotlin conversion usually every line of a file changes, so that git cannot find that these old and new files somehow relate to each other.

You can use the following two-stage approach instead:

• just change the extension of .java file to .kt and commit it;
• rename it back, apply the conversion and commit the modified .kt file.