I'm not convinced about ignoring everything, but one of the best changes I ever made to my git workflow was ignoring all dotfiles by default by adding `.*` to ~/.config/git/ignore.

My projects do now have to have a boiler plate of unignoring the common ones (!.gitignore, !.gitattributes, !.github, !.editorconfig, etc), but then I'm free at any point to throw .foo.lang files, or .tmp/.cache dirs, or Claude helpers like .code_analysis.md, or .todos.txt, or whatever in my project without managing the fallout of forgetting to manage the .gitignore. I'm surprised more people don't go this route.

Couldn't you put !.gitignore et al in your global config file?

I normally go with `.*/` -- I find that hidden files are much more likely than hidden directories to be useful.

I have `playground/` in my ignore config, that way I can just create a playground directory for any project and do stuff in there

I do the same