Comment by quuxplusone

I dunno, I've never done what TFA suggests, but it makes sense to me. The idea isn't that your new foo.go file would be ignored by default; it's that your Go project's repo's .gitignore file would start with * and then !*.go , so that your new foo.go file would show up as untracked-and-unignored but your new foo.go.sav~ and .DS_Store and .foobarrc files would not.

Maybe that's more ergonomic than forcing all users to learn about ~/.gitignore or manually adding .DS_Store *.sav~ et cetera into your Go project's repo's .gitignore.