I wrote a longer comment saying this (deleted now since I was wrong). Turns out that Git does somewhat store dirs (in form of trees). See https://git-scm.com/b

I wrote a longer comment saying this (deleted now since I was wrong). Turns out that Git does somewhat store dirs (in form of trees). See https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects (section "Tree Objects"). To understand op's repro look at the last two lines (objects in the tree) in each of their command outputs, not the files shown in the first few lines. What I think op means is that the `testing` tree pointed in their first example is sorted after `testing.md` even though it's only called `testing` because it's being sorted as `testing/` and `/` is > `.` bytewise. I'm not at a computer right now but it would be nice to test it with files named `testing.` and `testing0` since they are adjacent bytewise and would show the implicit forward slash more clearly with the tree object sitting between them. This makes me wonder why Git can't just store an empty tree for empty dirs. EDIT: did the Gist https://gist.github.com/alvaro-cuesta/bd0234e3e1a66819c7e9e9f2dc587a87 https://gist.github.com/alvaro-cuesta/bd0234e3e1a66819c7e9e9... Notice the `git cat-file -p HEAD^{tree}` outputs.