Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

tl;dr: Create a .gitignore in your ~ with an asterisk on the first line and `!.dotfilename` on subsequent lines; the asterisk means Git will ignore everything, and the ! means Git will un-ignore that specific file or directory. (Be sure to include the .gitignore file itself.) Use Git as normal and push. To deploy on another machine/account, the easiest method is to check out as normal into a temporary directory, then move the .git directory from that temporary directory into your ~ and run `git revert`. Git will see all of the missing dotfiles as changes to be reverted and revert them into existence.

View on HN

One potential drawback of doing that is that every directory under ~/ that is not itself part of another git repository becomes part of that git repository, which could make some programs act weird, particularly project auto-detectors in IDEs and such.

To avoid that, one can rename the `.git` folder, effectively disabling auto-discovery, and run git with the option `--git-dir=<newname>`.

So the IDE or whatever would basically traverse up the filesystem looking for the first directory with a .git subdirectory? I've never encountered something like that but I suppose it's possible. Do you know of any IDEs specifically that do that?

At any rate, I didn't know renaming the .git directory was possible. Do you have to add the --git-dir option to every subsequent git command? Sounds like a pain but my dotfiles change rarely enough that I guess I could live with it if I had to.

you can also create a .git file with the path for the git-dir folder (git-dir: /path-to-git-folder/) but that is kind of like having the .git folder with the exception that some programs don't seem to support it.

Yeah, the git command traverses up the filesystem until it finds a ./.git/HEAD file or until it reaches /, whatever happens first. The problem comes when a 3rd program uses git to find the root of a project that doesn't exist and instead of failing finds ~/.git and naively decides to index everything under ~/. I don't know of any specific IDEs that do that, although I vaguely remember running into a similar issue in the past, maybe not with an IDE, which is probably why I do it that way.

In `~/.git/config` do:

   [status]
     showUntrackedFiles = no

That solves most of those problems, as git will only consider files already in the repository and ignore everything else in your home directory.

Don't track your home directory with Git if you have a habit of using git clean -xdf. Speaking from a bad experience.

This is what I do. It's simple enough and doesn't require any external dependencies. Highly recommend this approach.

The only issue I've had with this approach is that new files which I'd like to commit to the repository are ignored by default. One could use the .gitignore negation strategy like OP mentions to first unignore the file and then add it to the repository. I just end up using git add -f foo to force the addition even though foo is ignored.

Wow, thank you! This is pretty easy and without all the acrobatics you usually see people do when dealing with dotfiles.

git config status.showUntrackedFiles no

Reply on news.ycombinator.com