Have a local folder to put your crap in which won't get accidentally committed

Do you always have temp / scratch files lying around in your Git repo and sometimes accidentally commit them (like I do)?

Add local/ to your global gitignore file and now you have a place where you can put your not-so-temp files and they won't bother you ever again when you use a git add -A.

You can define a global .gitignore in your global git config file:

#  ~/.gitconfig
[core]
        excludesfile = ~/.gitignore_global

And in the excludesfile add a line for the local/ folder:

#  ~/.gitignore_global
local/