.gitignore regex for emacs temporary files

Question

I\'m trying to .gitignore emacs temporary/autosave files. I\'m using...

\\.\\#.*

in my .gitignore.

But git add -A run in

Answer 1

To suppress the temporary Emacs files appearing on git status globally, you can do the following:

1. Configure git to use a global excludesfile

   Since this is a common problem, git has a specific solution to that:

   Patterns which a user wants Git to ignore in all situations (e.g., backup or temporary files generated by the user’s editor of choice) generally go into a file specified by core.excludesFile in the user’s ~/.gitconfig

   git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global    
   

2. Create the respective file

    cd
    touch .gitignore_global
   

3. Paste the following template into the file

   # -*- mode: gitignore; -*-
   *~
   \#*\#
   /.emacs.desktop
   /.emacs.desktop.lock
   *.elc
   auto-save-list
   tramp
   .\#*
   
   # Org-mode
   .org-id-locations
   *_archive
   
   # flymake-mode
   *_flymake.*
   
   # eshell files
   /eshell/history
   /eshell/lastdir
   
   # elpa packages
   /elpa/
   
   # reftex files
   .rel
   
   # AUCTeX auto folder
   /auto/
   
   # cask packages
   .cask/
   dist/
   
   # Flycheck
   flycheck_*.el
   
   # server auth directory
   /server/
   
   # projectiles files
   .projectile
   
   # directory configuration
   .dir-locals.el
   
   # network security
   /network-security.data
   

4. Watch git do its magic! :)

Answer 2

If you want an easy way to ignore files, you can also use http://www.gitignore.io which helps create useful .gitignore files for your project.

Here is the emacs template: https://www.gitignore.io/api/emacs

There is also documentation demonstrating how to run gi from the command line.

Answer 3

Emacs autosave files are ignored with

\#*#

Answer 4

You can also instruct emacs to save the autosave files in a different directory altogether by setting the variable auto-save-file-name-transforms, I have this in my init file

(setq auto-save-file-name-transforms
          `((".*" ,(concat user-emacs-directory "auto-save/") t))) 

This instructs emacs to store the auto-saves inside the auto-save folder in the user-emacs-directory (usually ~/.emacs.d).

To save backup files in a different directory set the variable backup-directory-alist, the following will save backup files inside backups folder in the user-emacs-directory

(setq backup-directory-alist
      `(("." . ,(expand-file-name
                 (concat user-emacs-directory "backups")))))

Answer 5

files are ignored with:

\#*\# .\#*

Answer 6

gitignore doesn't use regular expressions. Instead it uses shell glob patters. The man page tells you two things important for this situation:

Otherwise, Git treats the pattern as a shell glob suitable for
consumption by fnmatch(3) with the FNM_PATHNAME flag.

and

A line starting with # serves as a comment. Put a backslash ("\")
in front of the first hash for patterns that begin with a hash.

This means that the pattern you want to use is simply .#*.

Now the second pattern that matov mentioned, #*, doesn't do anything as it is treated as a comment by git. Hence me quoting that second sentence from the man page.