Consider removing Eclipse artifacts from project

[mdgeek]

The inclusion of Eclipse artifacts (.settings, .project, .classpath) is a bit of a pain when doing pulls as they always trigger a merge. We routinely exclude these from our commits for that reason. This is a gentle request to remove them.

[jamesagnew]

This seems reasonable, we probably should have done so long ago.
In the old days, Eclipse's Maven support was awful and checking in your eclipse files made it a bit less painful to deal with.. but these days that just doesn't seem to be the case any more.

[XcrigX]

I still see .project, .settings, .classpath files/folders sprinkled all throughout the project.

If you do want to attempt to remove them, here is a recipe I follow:

First add/commit any current changes, obviously.

Then update the root .gitignore file, I use https://www.gitignore.io to assist generating gitignore files. Pretty handy..

You can use this command to then see the files in the project that correspond to ignored files:
git ls-files -i --exclude-from=.gitignore

And this to remove them from git tracking without removing them from your local disk:
git rm --cached 'git ls-files -i --exclude-from=.gitignore'

Source:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13541615/how-to-remove-files-that-are-listed-in-the-gitignore-but-still-on-the-repositor