.gitignore Everything by Default

You can also gitignore everything and add files with the -f flag

I kinda like it, but if you come to think of it, that's just a misuse of `git add -A`. Nothing goes into a git repository unless you specifically add it, so why not just be more careful when adding files?

There's something similar I've done programming on linux. I've been working on some things in Odin programming language for a while and there are a ton of changes I've made where the commit contained an executable, because when Odin compiler makes the executable it names it after the main package's directory, without suffix.

Once I complained about this to the community someone suggested a clever gitignore hack:

    *
    !*/
    !*.*

This by default ignores all files, except those that have a suffix and directories. I think this is a useful lesson - if you flip which files you ignore you can change the failure mode from "I accidentally committed a huge file into a repo" to "why isn't it working?". The latter can be pretty much be answered by good CI testing (maybe not always though).

I discovered this[0] "allowlist" approach for Go a while ago:

  # Ignore everything
  \*
  
  # But not these files...
  !/.gitignore
  !*.go
  !go.sum
  !go.mod
  !README.md
  !LICENSE
  
  # ...even if they are in subdirectories
  !*/

[0] https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/main/community/Gola...

This is a smart pattern with .dockerignore where it keeps a lot of huge things from getting copied into the context... but it's also so confusing every time your container doesn't have the new file you created.

I think you're going to have to allow `app/*` which means you will be checking in some .DS_STORE files anyway.

Instead of ignoring everything, this is how I manage my $HOME directory of dotfiles via a bare git repo.

  $ alias config='/usr/bin/git --git-dir=$HOME/.cfg/ --work-tree=$HOME'
  $ echo ".cfg" >> ~/.gitignore
  $ git clone --bare <git-repo-url> $HOME/.cfg
  $ config config --local status.showUntrackedFiles no

Nothing is shown as untracked by default. When I add new config files to track, I have to add them to stage them explicitly.

The only sticking point is when I forget to use `git add -u .` when committing changes to files which are already being tracked.

I don't remember why I went with this over the global * ignore.