Git is ignoring .idea folder, but that isn't in gitignore

Question

The problem:

I\'m on OSX. I have a very small .gitignore file, and I even tried completely deleting the file. Nothing helps. Git doesn\'t see anything under my .id

Answer 1

I had the same problem. In my .git/exclude/info file, I exclude the names of executables that are created. But I often use the same name for the directories in which these executables reside, e.g. the "sphere" directory contains the executable "sphere". Since I had added all of the files before excluding the executable names in info/exclude, the fatal error never kicked in, even after excluding the directory/executable name to info/exclude.

Recently, however, I tried to add a file from a directory whose name was already excluded (because it matched the name of an executable I was excluding). The fatal error kicked in, and I was confused. I forced the add, and now any subsequent adds ignore the fatal error.

What this suggests is that it makes sense to exclude executable names in local .gitignore files, rather than in info/exclude.