If you're working on a project with a team but you don't want to clutter up the .gitignore file, or the commit history with a bunch of helper files from your file manager, text editor, or IDE then you can run this to ignore them in any projects on your system:
1 2 | $ git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
$ echo -e ".DS_Store\n.idea\n*.swp" >> ~/.gitignore
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I've added ignores for OS X's metadata files (.DS_Store), PyCharm's helpers (.idea) and Vim's swap files (.swp) as an example.