Comment by electrovir

20 hours ago

For many years I've have a git-ignored ".not-committed" folder in all of my repos for throwing extra anything into. It's been a huge life saver!

You can just add it in a user-level gitignore instead of ignoring it in every repo. See: ~/.config/git/ignore

  • I only realized very recently that being able to specify .gitignore files in any part of a repo can be combined with wildcards to just put `.gitignore` with `*` in a arbitrary directories to make them get ignored without needing to modify any wider configuration.

    • I'm doing that all the time. Starting with a .vim directory that contains vim-specific files, such as scripts / build commands to be run on certain key combinations, to ".misc" / ".scratch" / ".notes" / ".api-keys" directories... I wouldn't want to list them all in my global .gitignore because I'd certainly forget half of the names I tend to give to these...

  • This has the disadvantage though, that this user level gitignore file will not be in the repo, which means that other less careful contributors have to fix ignoribg for themselves.

  • yes, but user level is not a repo level

    • Yes, but this is exactly the sort of thing that should be a user-level configuration. A personal scratch directory has nothing to do with the repository itself and doesn’t belong in a repo’s .gitignore.

      If it's only needed for one particular checkout, .git/info/exclude is the other obvious option.

      1 reply →

i usually do "*ignorethis*", so a file with .ignorethis extension does not strictly have to be under a specific directory, this might save context somewhere. similar approach but yeah, a huge life saver!