The global/user wide exclude is a feature that should be more widely known. I frequently have people submitting changes to add their IDE/OS/AI/... files to every project's .gitignore. They are almost always pleasantly surprised when I tell them that they can add them to their standard configuration and have them ignored everywhere without bothering every project and without risk of accidentally committing them on a project where they haven't updated the .gitignore yet.

My general rule is that in-repo .gitignore should only be used for repo-specific things (build outputs, dependency folders, ...) and most user tools should be in their own user config.

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Anon1096 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You frequently having to tell people about a global configuration gitignore is an obvious consequence of "My general rule is that in-repo .gitignore should only be used for repo-specific things". It wastes less of everyone's time to just gitignore them in every project.

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wccrawford 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've always added it to the project's gitignore because I want to make sure nobody else adds those to the project, either, out of ignorance. I'm mainly doing it out of kindness to them, because I am definitely removing them from git again and it's going to cause them some pain.

In the future, I think I might just be less nice about it. I dunno.

	▲	nomel 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yeap. To reduce pain, you need to work with reality rather than ideals. If you work with a big group, you either add a few lines into your gitignore, or you write code to check for those very same files in your CI/PR system, because you're tired of reversing commits and rejecting PRs because you're the only one that cares about a few extra files.
	▲	eyelidlessness an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’m not sure kindness is the best framing. At least, not in terms of being nice to any particular person who might commit unwanted files by mistake. It’s one of several tools a project can use to ensure quality, alongside eg linters and formatters. Automating those (in this case by defaulting to the expected outcome) reduces friction on basically every operation anyone might do in a project, in any context. Through the lens of kindness, it benefits you as well as your team… and ultimately everyone else downstream, since you’re all not wasting time and cognitive load on trivially preventable mistakes.

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8cvor6j844qw_d6 10 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I prefer gitignore since it survives dev container rebuilds. Although I probably can set a creation script or volume to restore/persist configs if I must avoid gitignore.