Alan, On Tuesday, May 26, 2015 at 15:56, Alan Mackenzie , wrote: No. The file is not to be committed. It is my own personal copy of .gitignore with my idiosyncratic filenames in it, something I will not impose upon fellow Emacs hackers. ​ ​You might like to know about the git "exclude" file. It is a local, per-clone file that lives in .git/info from the root of the repository's directory tree. The syntax of the file are the same as .gitignore, and it has the same effect with regards to making files unknown to git, but since it's a per-clone file you don't have to worry about accidentally committing your own private changes and pushing them to someone else. ​ ​See https://help.github.com/articles/ignoring-files/ for more information. The "global gitignore" section of that page is also a very nice tip.  ​ ​Regards, ​ ​Tom Jakubowski ​P.S. I've sent this from a mobile email client which does not seem to like the idea of bottom posting. I hope this message didn't come out terribly mangled.