So if you refactor a function from one file to another, the normal git blame will simply show you as the author in the new file, but the -C option will follow that movement and show the last person to actually change those lines of code. This is incredibly minor, and some GUIs have nice versions of this (I find GitHub's better than what I'm about to show you, since it subtly does both) but if you ARE running git diff on the command line and there is a line change where something small changed within it, you can change Git's default format to word-based rather than line based with the --word-diff option. $ git config --global rerere.enabled true $ git config --global rerere.autoUpdate true