If you're doing an initial setup step to gitignore everything, why not just do an initial setup step to gitignore the usual files? Make a template that you copy into all of your repos.
```.gitignore
# Ignores
## Unix hidden files
.*
## Temporary files and backups
*~
*.swp
*.bak
# Exceptions
!.ignore
!.gitignore
```
Now, I could extend my user-global ignore, but there's no project where I want the state of the repo to be wrong, but my local state saving me unknowingly, as I know it'll bite others.
Keys, npm directories and huge binaries are fixed by deleting them later on. The horror.
Not pushing a file has a much easier fix than pushing an API key. The damage is also very different.
Sure, both have failure modes but the effect of the failure is different and acting like they're the same isn't helpful to finding solutions
Yeah command line is cool and all but I do believe most of the developers should be using UI tooling where staging area is showing nice diffs.
Built in GIT handling in IDE usually is better than command line but also usually worse than dedicated tool like GitExtensions or SourceTree which are free and are super convenient for staging.
People don't know they don't have to stage whole files but they can stage hunks, well in command line it is too much hassle for me but in GUI tools it is no brainer.
I recommend looking here: https://git-scm.com/tools/guis
(it might be that you will be waaay cooler using GUI tool because you will be able to fix things others can't ... saying from my experience)
I mean I do too, then git status to check what went it, then unstage files that aren't supposed to be there, rewrite .gitignore to exclude them (usually), and finally commit. Tends to be faster than manually adding each file/path. Alternatively, I start out with `git add -p` (interactive) and go through that workflow.
You clearly haven't seen the people who are lazy and so just do `git add . && git commit -m ... && git push -f origin` every time.
> people who are lazy and so just do `git add . && git commit -m ... && git push -f origin` every time.
You see the issue right?
Adding extra, sensitive, files would not cause test failures, and even if they do (via secret scanners, etc), it is too late at that point because they will have already been shared upstream.
I am not sure the juice is worth the squeeze here, but it has some logic to it.
I’ve worked with and managed plenty of people like that and those are the people I least want doing something like this. Seeing the flotsam and jetsam of .DS_Store etc. are an early warning sign they aren’t paying any attention to what they push and the sooner that gets caught and addressed the better.
(disclaimer - this is my own tool)
[0] https://github.com/asamarts/alint [1] https://alint.org/docs/rules/git-hygiene/git_no_denied_paths...
This one file was more sophisticated than any other file in the project.
It contained "good practices", editors/IDE files of applications dead for more than 10y, personal. /tmp directories in various names, files versioning using suffixes and comments for sections v of rules starting about in half of the file.
This project learned my to keep your own shit in local global gitignore not in project.
In this case, a `.gitignore_global` takes care of the usual suspects that he mentioned `.DS_Store files, IDE config, compressed files, etc.`. Even if something goes wrong, it is usually caught during the initial scaffold before critical files goes in.
If one is working with new, young, rookie developers, give them the typical lesson on the global gitignore, local, config, and to have dotfiles, etc. Give yours for inspiration or something to start with.
Edit: I know that mine is not the best of the dotfiles on the internet but this has helped me switch multiple devices, multiple identities (work, projects, personal, etc) easily. I recently cleaned it up and added automation, test, etc with Claude Code. https://github.com/brajeshwar/dot
What is weird about it?
Finally can have Emacs files ignored automatically in all projects. <3
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been pairing with someone when they just say “git add .”, I’m always confused by that choice.
I get it, but I’ve seen more problems arise from adding all than being consistently selective. To each their own.
I’m far more interested in confirming my mental model of what I am about to commit if I git commit right now than my mental model of what will be added if I git add right now.
If I didn’t already have that muscle memory I might try to switch to git add -v . which would tell me what files it added. I’d argue that a sane git would just output git status after a git add operation.
But also a sane git would have a more logical command than git rm —cached to unstage a file. Like git unstage perhaps.
https://kapeli.com/cheat_sheets/Oh-My-Zsh_Git.docset/Content...
I've never managed to get on with any UI for basic git tasks, they always end up been slower.
Changes that are needed to get the project to run right in the dev environment, but that should never be committed, are a smell: I move them to config that doesn't get committed.
Increasingly with agents I'm likely working on multiple features in parallel (I haven't adopted git worktrees but I probably should). Even then I try to lay out code so concurrent changes touch disjoint parts of the codebase, so I can do "git add Widgets/FooWidget/" and the ten files modified under there will be the right things to commit.
Maybe 30% of the time I find I have done work that belongs in multiple commits and I need to break it up. Even then I often end up doing "git add -p ." to interactively pick the parts I want to add.
How is CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md "junk that shouldn't be in your repository"? If you're using agents for a project and have some project-specific rules for them, why would you want other people using agents in your repository to not have access to those rules and produce worse code?
- Right now at $WORK, CLAUDE.md has a line saying to put one-off scripts in some gitignored place. That's fine if they're not worth checking in (IMO, you should build the tooling which would have made the script easy and check that in, but whatever), but that AI rule doesn't really keep them from being checked in -- developers manually review every line of code and decide what to check in -- that's just somebody deciding they'd rather not have to think so hard when running git add. Which is fine, but it directly conflicts with my preference for all AI-generated files to be plainly visible as a diff or with git status or something. They have a different diffing strategy, which is also fine, but that's just a dev's personal preference encoded in a whole-team doc.
- Or, I have a prompt I use to encourage higher quality code before I have to manually inspect it. It basically says "delete $200 and 1hr." For somewhat obvious reasons, I don't run it on every piece of code the AI shits out. I make it available in the project for people who want to use it, but I don't even want it in my CLAUDE.md, much less the team's.
- Similarly with whether to use git for checkpointing. I prefer to check the AIs output at each step. A colleague prefers to have it save its progress using git in 30+ commits on a side branch and then check them all at once. One of those workflows was in CLAUDE.md and absolutely is not anymore -- it's quite appropriate for a single developer's AI settings, but not for the team as a whole.
Those settings files are a lot closer to .vscode directories or other dev-specific editor configuration. Project-specific information should be exposed differently.
CLAUDE.local.md is the one that should be in .gitignore.
I block every port for VPS, then open one by one. Same approach here with files.
The only downside I see here is, knowing which one to allow. For ports, it's easy, but files can have many different extensions.
Apps/CLIs, etc create files with extensions you never encountered before, which can cause issues.
Other than that, I like the apporach
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.
It hobbles `git status` and essentially forces you to keep track of what you've changed yourself (since ignored files won't show up there), and it can instill a false sense of security that `git add .` is safe when it might not be.
(disclaimer - this is my own tool)
[0] https://github.com/asamarts/alint
[1] https://alint.org/docs/rules/git-hygiene/git_no_denied_paths...
- https://github.com/github/gitignore
- funny how I did not see a single comment talk about this
https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/Rust.gitignore for example still falls victim to basically all of the issues specifically called out.
(disclaimer - this is my own tool)
[0] https://github.com/asamarts/alint
[1] https://alint.org/docs/rules/git-hygiene/git_no_denied_paths...
I'd say the correct approach is to include all your top level files (i.e. CMakeLists.txt, .gitignore, etc.) but also your top-level *directories*, i.e. `/renderer`, `/UI`, `/tools`, whatever.
Then, crucially, your build system must also prohibit in-source builds and require a dedicated build directory.
This way, it's presumed that everything in your source tree is pristine and correct, and can host a variety of file types depending on your needs (realistically, source trees can contain lots of things; data, json, images, text, etc.) while you also shouldn't have to worry about polluting it accidentally.
I'd incrementally add files until the project would load successfully after a fresh clone. Handling of subsequent concerns like lightmap data and external services became a lot easier having had the experience built up from zero.
There, problem solved. This covers all cases I think.
(disclaimer - this is my own tool)
[0] https://github.com/asamarts/alint
[1] https://alint.org/docs/rules/git-hygiene/git_no_denied_paths...
https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/branch/master/.gitignor...
That fixes the problem of every project enumerating the settings files for every editor.
Then, as others have said, you should commit only the files you intend to commit; and ignore the files that you don’t intend to commit. This shouldn’t be difficult if you’re reviewing what you’re committing anyways.
Listing new files is easy with git status, at which point you can decide to ignore them. If everything is ignored, how do you know what files are new in order to know to un-ignore them?
The real problem is that the entire reason to use git at this point is because of the conventions established around it. There are better VCSes and methods now, but they "break" the conventions of git (which honestly sucks, but it is what it is).
For Golang users, I dunno...
…is what I would say if I had no filter. But it does make sense what I see in PRs sometimes - have you proofread any of this before pushing?