A Simple Notes File in Every Project, Ignored by Git Globally

When working on code projects it's common and important to have a place where you can keep track of important information or notes. Whether it's for personal projects, team collaboration, or just to remember something specific, having a centralized location for these notes is invaluable.

I have used several centralized notes applications, up to this point my basic routine was to use Asana for larger projects and Google Docs for smaller one off notes. This is not an impressive solution for a modern software engineer by any means. My hip friends are using custom emacs and vim setups or at least some central text based tool like Obsidian. I never ended up on Obsidian because I was happy enough with what I had and always avoid paying over time for things if I can.

I've known that I needed a better solution and randomly this idea came to me. I haven't yet researched it (I imagine this is far from a new idea) but... What I ended up doing recently I feel is worth sharing in case you haven't considered it.

Setting Up a Git Global Ignore with a Standard Notes File Name

Some may not know this (even though I did know I never used it): You can set up a global .gitignore file that applies to all repositories on that machine.

I created a file ~/.gitignore with the following content:

**/.notes.md

I then followed this Stack Overflow post with commands to config git to use this global .gitignore.

For me on Windows PowerShell it was:

git config --global core.excludesFile "$Env:USERPROFILE\.gitignore"

I created the .gitignore in the right place by using the following command in Windows PowerShell:

code $Env:USERPROFILE\.gitignore

Note that this works by opening the new file in VS Code and from there you'll need to add the */.notes.md entry and save the file.

Now when I create a note file called .env.notes.md in any project, Git will ignore it by default!

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