How to Hide Files In Git Locally

This is a very small tip on how to cleanup your .gitignore files.

Usually you just add everything that you want to ignore from version control into the .gitignore file, and all is well. But what happens when you want to ignore a certain file or folder, and it only applies to your current setup, or your current IDE? You shouldn't need to pollute the .gitignore file in version control because you want to hide something locally.

To fix this, look no further then the .git/info/exclude file! If you cat it out, it will explain itself:

# git ls-files --others --exclude-from=.git/info/exclude
# Lines that start with '#' are comments.
# For a project mostly in C, the following would be a good set of
# exclude patterns (uncomment them if you want to use them):
# *.[oa]
# *~

Just like your .gitignore, just add a line for each file you want to ignore, and only your system will be affected!

As an added bonus, if there is a list of files you want to hide (locally) across many projects, you can add them to your ~/.config/git/ignore file instead!