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  • Magit really is the only git frontend worth using. It exposes all of this kind of stuff in an easy to use way. You can easily ignore files using all three methods with magit.

    The more useful thing here is the "typical use" of each one. People who don't know about other methods get this wrong a lot and put cruft from their own tools/editors in .gitignore which is annoying.

    by globular-toast
  • I learned this while using IntelliJ, because it suggests both options. I searched for the difference and, once understood, I was able to use the knowledge everywhere.

    The other useful advice is when there is a full folder you want to ignore. Putting a .gitignore with a single "*" ignores the full folder...including the gitignore file itself.

    I do use it when I quickly need to ignore the .idea folder

    by TrianguloY
  • > editor clutter has no business in any project's .gitignore, and yet there it is, in most of them

    I couldn't agree more with this - except that, in practice, nobody bothers to add their own environment clutter to their own global (or even project-related) gitignore. So invariably we end up with PRs (and even main :scream:) peppered with various .vscode and similar lost souls.

    by BerislavLopac
  • > but pushing the silly filename I picked for my private notes to a remote repository feels unclean

    Pick a directory for them and ignore the directory. Other team members who want to keep their own notes can use that directory as well.

    by BigTTYGothGF
  • This is great... one thing I wish is to be able to exclude are lines, for instance some lines in my config that only benefits the work I do. Some configs don't allow extending and that's where this would come in handy. Anyone have any tricks for that?
    by psygn89
  • This is great, and nicely written up in the context of agentic repos etc, but presumably no-one reads the official docs, right: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore where the multiple ways of ignoring files are clearly stated?
    by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn
  • Just a nit-pick, but some/repo/path/.gitignore isn't necessarily committed to the repo. For example, if your repo has no .gitignore file, you can totally add one in your clone without adding it to the tree. Of course then you can't do something like `git add .` without committing it.

    Also `~/.gitignore` works as a global gitignore. I usually stick something like `katie*` in there so I can copy some `script.sh` to `katie_script.sh` and then I can make changes that I don't want to commit.

    Quick edit: I'm not sure `~/.gitignore` works out of the box.. looks like I stuck that in my `~/.gitconfig` for excludesfile

    by ktm5j

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