Rebranding a project without a single commit

I've been working on a project called Hybridly, but I couldn't find a name until long after the project was started. The project's codename was Monolikit.

I wanted to rebrand the project, but I didn't like the idea of having one big commit with a big search-and-replace. That would disrupt the history and cause trouble when using git blame.

The first thing I tried was a git rebase -i on the first commit - but that proved very tedious and I don't like manual work. So when looking for other solutions, I stumbled upon git-filter-repo, a tool for rewriting Git history. Exactly what I needed.

After installing it with brew install git-filter-repo, this simple one-liner solved all my problems:

git filter-repo \
  --blob-callback 'blob.data = blob.data.replace(b"monolikit", b"hybridly").replace(b"Monolikit", b"Hybridly").replace(b"MONOLIKIT", b"HYBRIDLY")' \
  --filename-callback 'return filename.replace(b"monolikit", b"hybridly").replace(b"Monolikit", b"Hybridly").replace(b"MONOLIKIT", b"HYBRIDLY")' \
  --force

Basically, it goes over all the commits, and replace both Monolikit and monolikit with the new name.