TIL
Ignore files in a git repo locally
I had a scratch file in a repo, some debugging notes I did not want to commit. Sometimes I added it to .gitignore, but I did not want to commit the .gitignore change either, so I had to keep that change out of every commit by hand. That was really annoying.
Today I learned about .git/info/exclude. It does the same thing but stays on my machine. Same syntax as .gitignore. Git ignores those paths for me locally, without me having to commit any changes to the repo.
echo "NOTES.md" >> .git/info/exclude
echo "docs/" >> .git/info/exclude
Note: it only works on files git is not already tracking. If a file is already committed, run git rm --cached on it first.