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Comment by seri4l | Hacker News Reader

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>`.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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