I've got two long living branches develop and next, where every commit in develop has to be in next as well.

The files in next have been moved to different folders.

Now I want to apply a formatter on the code base. I thought: If I apply the formatter on both branches, I won't get a merge conflict (at least of the files which aren't modified in next except by the formatter) when merging develop into next. But that doesn't seem to be true: the rename detection doesn't recognize the files have moved, so I end up with conflicts.

I even tried to merge with a lower setting for find.renames, despite it doesn't make sense, as most of the conflicted files in both branches are identical.

Is there an option I've overlooked?