Global Git Ignore

For years I dumped this into my .gitignore files: *.sw?. Then I realised that some people don't use Vim, and therefore probably don't want to see my editor-specific .gitignore entries. Different editors handle swap and recovery files different ways, so it seems redundant to force these settings on everyone.

A better approach is to use a global option. Run git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore. Then you can add *.sw?, and perhaps *~ as well. I like to add .DS_Store because Windows developers don't need to worry about that nonsense, and they should probably add Thumbs.db.