Git not excluding even untracked files

Question

I am running into a problem with git. I have initialized a new git repo and wrote ".gitignore" first but git is not excluding those files and folders. I have tried "git rm -r --cached" and then added only .gitignore file but it all went in vain. []

Tried unstaging the files but as you can see in the screenshot, git status is still showing the .venv and pycache folder that should be excluded in the untracked section.

Answer 1

As suggested by @j6t , UTF-16 encoding for .gitignore will not work. So, save it as UTF-8 and the problem will be gone. If you run into the same problem then before following any other procedures make sure correct encoding has been selected while saving the file.

Answer 2

Git ignore lists can have !<pattern> lines that undo or add an exception to an ignore pattern that was previously set.

For example:

# mydir/.gitignore
# Ignore everything in this directory
*
# Except this file
!.gitignore

Git loads its ignore list from (highest precedence to lowest):

1. Patterns specified on the command line.
2. Whatever core.excludesFile is set to, by default $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore aka ~/.config/git/ignore
3. .git/info/exclude
4. <current directory>/.gitignore

I would check:

1. Is there a .venv/.gitignore file that contains some exclusion lines?
2. Is there an exclusion line later on in the root-level .gitignore file that mentions !.venv or !/.venv?