Seeing the ignored files list / "unignore"

[AndrewStopchenko-SO]

Hi, first things first - huge thank you for this awesome tool!

Sorry if I missed that in the docs, but, is there a view in the Lazygit that allows user to view the list of ignored files? Quickly scanning the keybindings in Files and Branches views, I only saw the way to add files to the ignore/exclude lists. But how can one "undo" that - view and edit the ignored items list?

For example, if I added some file not to the .gitignore (which is the usual go-to to check for the ignored files/patterns) but to the .git/info/exclude (which is more like "git's guts" and can be missed easily), I am not sure how to review that ignore list(s)...

Maybe there's even a way to figure out where some particular ignore items are coming from - .gitignore or .git/info/exclude)?

[darekwojciechowski]

You didn't miss it — there isn't one. The files panel only has i (Ignore or exclude file), and there's no view that lists ignored entries or lets you remove them. lazygit doesn't call git check-ignore anywhere in its codebase, so it has no notion of tracing where a rule came from either.

The good news is git answers both of your questions in one command. check-ignore -v prints the source file and line number for every match, and you can feed it the full ignored list:

git ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard | git check-ignore --stdin -v

You get output like:

.gitignore:3:*.log        debug.log
.git/info/exclude:5:notes.md      notes.md

so the .git/info/exclude entries you were worried about losing track of are labelled explicitly, with the line number to edit.

If you want it a keypress away, lazygit's custom commands can bind it:

customCommands:
  - key: "<c-i>"
    context: "files"
    description: "show ignore source for file"
    command: "git check-ignore -v --no-index {{.SelectedFile.Name}}"
    showOutput: true

Undoing still means editing .gitignore or .git/info/exclude by hand, but at least the output tells you exactly which file and line to open.

Given the tool has an "ignore" action with no matching "unignore", this seems like a reasonable feature request if you want to open one.

[AndrewStopchenko-SO]

Thanks for the explanation!

The good news is git answers both of your questions in one command. check-ignore -v prints the source file and line number for every match, and you can feed it the full ignored list:
git ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard | git check-ignore --stdin -v

Today I Learned.

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I agree, that might be a good feature; UX-wise, I think it would be great if the list of detected/known ignore files is shown, and from there we could maybe press e to open the file in vim (similar to how conflicted file can currently be manually edited).

[AndrewStopchenko-SO]

Created the #5880 feature request.