Hacker News Reader

Comment by joeblau | Hacker News Reader

This is a great guide. I followed the similar steps for https://gitignore.io

I was doing a lot of development work and going to github.com/github/gitignore to copy templates from GitHub's website to my own file system was getting tedious. What I wanted was a simple command line tool like

  gi java > .gitignore

So I built it over the course of a week while at Mammoth CA. I was on a snowboard trip so I would ride during the day and code at night. I was thankful to have a great designer (who worked at GitHub) help me design the site. And today the project is almost 5 years old and gets nearly 80,000 MAU's.

View on HN

A little feedback - it seems a bit mixed up. If I put in "Node" it assumes I want suggestions for files that you'd typically ignore on a Node project. That's useful. But if I enter "Web" it gives me a list of web file types to ignore (*.html etc). Rather than assume I'm working on a web project (as it does for Node) it's doing the opposite of that, and making suggestions to ignore all the "Web" files.

Clearly this isn't a huge problem as your project is doing really well, but it jumped out at me a bit.

The history on this is that originally, templates like Web, Compressed, Audio, Video, etc... were added to ignore an entire domain's tele tapes instead of assuming that you're working on any of those types of projects. Right now, there isn't anything that differentiates the domain specific templates from a language, IDE, or operating system template. Not sure how to improve the experience off the top of my head but I'll think about it.

Good feedback.

This idea sounds like a good use for ‘choose’ [1]. It’d be a bash script that uses curl to get a list of the languages with gitignores, pipes to choose to let the user choose one, and pipes it into curl again to get the gitignore contents and sends to stdout.

[1] https://github.com/sdegutis/choose

That looks cool. Most of the time I was running into problems, I was on a remote server with no access to a GUI, but this does look like a cool integration.

Hey, thanks for the site! I use it all the time! Great tool to have!

You're welcome. Glad it's helping.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com