- or you could stop scratching your head so hard and actually use the gitignore templates for every programming language officially recommended by github itself
I use alint [0][1] to define and enforce rules about files/globs that should or shouldn't be committed, among other things. You can configure it run as a pre-commit hook or in CI.
These do not include os generated files like his first example, .DS_Store. I do use the templates, but I have a gist that I add to every project of os generated files that may work themselves in.
It's a good practice to ignore OS specific files in user level gitignore but I think that putting it (redundantly for some of us) in repo is a good practice. Some people don't maintain their own user ignores and might accidentally commit to shared repository. It's clearly fault of commiter and reviewer but let's just save ourselves stress and put those records in the .gitignore of the repo.
In my experience these templates don't cover enough and are always faulty. Not only that, most real-world projects use many different programming languages and markup languages.
I don't like them, because they contain all sort of crap, that never even enters my projects, but they don't include things they should include, like the silly ".vscode" folder so many people commit without thinking. Also usually using these templates one avoids thinking and knowing what is ignored, until one accidentally commits something special to the project and boom, creating a huge hassle.
You need to merge the relevant ignore files to create one specific for you, so if you use VSCode on macOS VisualStudioCode.gitignore (e.g., .vscode) + macOS.gitignore (e.g., .DS_Store). There are files for other OSs and editors as well. Technically their README says that the Global folder is intended for user-specific ignore files. But you can still use them for the repo .gitignore.
- https://github.com/github/gitignore
- funny how I did not see a single comment talk about this