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Don’t forget you also have a personal gitignore file in $HOME/.config/git/ignore

Posted by jpluimers on 2026/05/28

The question in [Wayback/Archive] git – What will happen when a pull request includes changes to ignored .gitignore? – Super User comes down to:

I don’t want anybody to change what’s in my .gitignore file because it includes some things that are specific to my own system.

Those settings should go in a personal gitignore file, which is mentioned in the [Wayback/Archive] Git – gitignore Documentation

Which file to place a pattern in depends on how the pattern is meant to be used.
  • Patterns which should be version-controlled and distributed to other repositories via clone (i.e., files that all developers will want to ignore) should go into a .gitignore file.
  • Patterns which are specific to a particular repository but which do not need to be shared with other related repositories (e.g., auxiliary files that live inside the repository but are specific to one user’s workflow) should go into the $GIT_DIR/info/exclude file.
  • Patterns which a user wants Git to ignore in all situations (e.g., backup or temporary files generated by the user’s editor of choice) generally go into a file specified by core.excludesFile in the user’s ~/.gitconfig. Its default value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used instead.
Thanks for [Wayback/Archive] Russ Lenth answering that in this section:

personal .gitignore should go to a different place defined by core.excludesFile$HOME/.config/git/ignore by default on Windows. And project .gitignore should include common files that can annoy anyone contributing to it.

--jeroen

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