I have been a Windows user for all my life until a year ago when I switched to Mac. I don’t regret that decision so far.

This article, however, is not a Mac glaze or an OS debate.

It's about how I accidentally discovered a secret git feature that no one talks about.

Ever since I switched, I've noticed there's this file called “.DS_Store” that starts appearing in my coding projects.

It's a bit annoying, but it seems harmless, so I ignored it.

Then one day it caused an error when I ran a Git command.

That’s when I finally looked it up.

Turns out, Mac OS automatically generates it whenever you open a folder in Finder.

It means that I have to add that to almost every project's “.gitignore” manually.

That's annoying.

I wonder if there's a way to do a global gitignore?

And there is.

Apparently, you just have to

(or "%USERPROFILE%\git\ignore" for Windows)

Then git will ignore these files across every Git repository on your machine.

You can use this to omit files like:

It's a nice little feature that lets you keep all the annoying files away from your git history forever.

- Fee from Anime Coders