Does anybody have a clean solution for files that need to be edited often, but are in .gitignore, and can't be checked in, such as .env?

[unphased]

as mentioned in the title, .env is the poster child for this problem.

• Tools to browse code files generally omit anything matching .gitignore from listing.
• Usually if a file is in .gitignore but checked into git (sorta weird) will still show properly since the latter overrides the former.
• .env is exempted from this!! We use it to store API keys and credentials for environment variables, we edit them often, so we need to use nvim to do so, and we must never check it into git, and to aid in that we add it to .gitignore. but this then forces it to be hidden and hard to pull up.

Right now the best workaround I've got for this is to manually include a !.env rule in my rg.gitignore which I symlink to ~/.ignore which is a convention established by ripgrep a while back and is also understood by fd-find.

So far I can see fzf-lua responds properly to this workaround, which likely means it is using fd to populate fzf for fzf-lua Files. That's good.

But I don't know how future proof this is.

[ibhagwan]

I might be missing something, have you tried toggle ignore with alt-i (there is also alt-h/alt-f, press F1 for help)?

[unphased]

Interesting. Thanks for showing me the help menu, but none of the alt bindings work here for me, that's alright though because probably there is some terminal specific binding i've done that makes alt+h not behave any different from plain h (or esc, h). My goal would be not to use fzf-lua in any stateful way (so I don't need to use any additional key binds to manipulate it), I just want to learn how best to deal with a situation like this. You see I already have a pretty well defined concept in my mind for which files should appear. I don't think there is a way to deal with this kind of file, because due to the above explanation, such an .env file clearly would be hidden by default based on all reasonable interpretations of rules that affect visibility of files, but maybe someone has a better idea.

Thanks!

[ibhagwan]

Thanks for showing me the help menu, but none of the alt bindings work here for me

You can customize it to another bind in the default actions.

You see I already have a pretty well defined concept in my mind for which files should appear.

You can start in different stats with :FzfLua files hidden=true or :FzfLua files no_ignore=true.

[unphased]

You can start in different stats with :FzfLua files hidden=true or :FzfLua files no_ignore=true.

Yes indeed. to clarify I want to keep all the same default behavior as files and my little ~/.ignore workaround works fine for special things like .env in projects! Thanks

[ibhagwan]

You can start in different stats with :FzfLua files hidden=true or :FzfLua files no_ignore=true.

Yes indeed. to clarify I want to keep all the same default behavior as files and my little ~/.ignore workaround works fine for special things like .env in projects! Thanks

You can combine outputs with manual ones, for example adding .env at the top of the list:

:lua FzfLua.files({ cmd = "echo .env && fd --type f", hidden = false  })

[unphased]

Oh that's very powerful and handy for exceptional cases like this. Hard to imagine right now but I can think of some situation that even ~/.ignore cannot paper over, so it's really good to know about that.

[ibhagwan]

Oh that's very powerful and handy for exceptional cases like this. Hard to imagine right now but I can think of some situation that even ~/.ignore cannot paper over, so it's really good to know about that.

This is quite simple, you can have much more complex customizations with xargs, awk, sed, perl one liners (-ne), etc.