alt Hacker NewsThis seems like bad advice. I've very rarely committed extra files by accident, but I would 100% forget to unignore files I meant to commit.
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.
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> The technique isn’t necessarily the right choice for every repository or developer, but is an alternative to explore.
You can also use something like alint [0][1] to define and enforce rules about files/globs that should or shouldn't be committed, among other things. You can configure it to run as a pre-commit hook or in CI.
(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 seems like bad advice. I've very rarely committed extra files by accident, [...]
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.
Recovery from forgetting to add something is _much_ easier than recovery from adding some weird configuration file with plaintext private keys in it.
For many years I've have a git-ignored ".not-committed" folder in all of my repos for throwing extra anything into. It's been a huge life saver!