I'm not sure I understand this problem. What would the "UI option" do? Specifically, I don't know how to implement this option:

• Make it easier to browse frequently renamed directories.

If there was some piece of code which did this, why wouldn't we always enable it?

When I browse to a path which no longer exists, I get reasonably good information about the fate of the file:

We could look in that commit for a move and specialize the text, to show something like:

This file was moved to <somewhere> by <rXYZabcdef>.

Is that what this is asking for? Or something totally different?

So, here's one example:
We have this file "etherpad/src/notes/control/maincontrol.ts". Right now the "history" page shows:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bmaip9ubr45yggd/Screenshot%202015-06-16%2023.51.56.png?dl=0

Note that the last commit is from a couple of weeks ago, when the file was renamed from "etherpad/src/etherpad/control/maincontrol.ts".
There is no prior history.

The "Show copies/branches" button looks helpful, but clicking it only seems to change the button from "Show" to "hide". Nothing else happens :/

My expectation would be that at least in the history view, it could be smart enough to show the history of the original file. I'd be completely fine if that was only done when clicking on the show copies/branches button.

fwiw, Google's code search tool had a nice view of this. It made it very clear when a file was "branched" by showing a bold heading with more spacing and then just listing that file's history underneath it.

Really though, there just needs to be a better way of getting to the original file's history. Right now the best thing to do is to open the commit, wait for everything to load, find the file, click history. That sequence could probably be improved :)

Does that make more sense?
Thanks!

This is the same as T1849 but I'm just going to merge that here since this one is sort of more complete, even though T1849 has a great screenshot.