There hasn't been general agreement on the merits of particular .gitignore rules of this sort.
You could hide your own favorite patterns by putting this into your ~/.gitignore that isn't part of the repo, configuring this globally, thus: git config --global core.excludesfile '~/.gitignore' That has the consequence that you can hide whatever things your own tools like to create, and not worry about others' preferences. Us Emacs users can put things like *~, #*#, and such into our own "ignore" configuration; that doesn't need to bother you, and vice-versa for your vim-oriented patterns.