Visual Studio Git: copy files and keep history

Question

Is there a way for a Visual Studio user to copy a bunch of files from one location to another and keep the history of both versions?

I found the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/44036771/1520078 , which may solve the problem for single files, but I want to copy hundreds of files, preferredly not having to rename each single one.

Answer 1

As noted in comments, files in Git do not have history. History, in Git, is nothing but commits: the commits are the history, and each commit has a full copy of every file.

What this means is that any viewer that purports to show "file history" is lying . It may do a very good job of lying, by using commit history to find exactly what you mean by "file history", or it may do a poor job of lying, by showing you something you don't mean at all. But it definitely has to lie because there is no file history, there is only commits-as-history.

Each Git commit viewer has its own method(s) of lying to produce file history, since users like to see file history. But each viewer tends to do it a little differently. Find a viewer you like, and use that one.