>I certainly don’t want a meaningful code change sandwiched between an open editor swap file

We are specifically not talking about the junk files created by editors and ides here.

We are talking about things like notes and exploratory code that you have written that you have no intention of committing, at least not right away. Why wouldn't you want to see them in your `git status`?

Another problem with putting such files in gitignore is that those files will become invisible to an increasingly large number of tools (vscode, ag aka silversearcher, ripgrep, emacs's projectile to name a few) that rely on gitignore to filter out unwanted files. So now, as far as these tools are concerned you have put your notes and experiments in the same category of files as editor junk and build artifacts. You either search them all or none at all.