Taking Notes in Git
Do you feel naked without a pen and paper? Do you have trouble paying attention to conversations you don’t document? Are you constantly worried about leaving your future self bread crumbs? My friend, you are not alone, you are a serial note-taker.
In the digital age, documentation and notes can be looked down upon in favor of quick Internet searches or the endless amount of references at our disposal. But I found that while concepts can easily be looked up in the web, the memory of documenting a concept I previously learned and looking for it in my notes helped me to piece together my knowledge gap more efficiently.
Even in my own projects, my note-taking took the form of serial commenting. I could go back to some of my projects and know exactly what functions are doing because of those comments. Imagine the difficulty I had in trying to figure out what functions were doing in the immense amount of code that my teammates built. I tried to take notes, but it’s really hard to piece together your notes with the code when they’re in two separate locations. So do I write notes in the code? NO!!! I want these notes to be for my eyes only, there’s a lot of vented frustration in some of my notes better left unseen by others *_* What’s a serial note-taker to do?
Exclude Files
Have you ever peeked inside the .git folder? There are a host of files and folders that come with repositories that you pull from github. One of them is the exclude file. Locally CD into the repository that you want to take notes on.
> cd <your repo>
> <Your editor> .git/info/exclude
And you should see something like this
I typed line 8 and 9, after I wrote in Notes I created a folder “Notes” in the repo and all files in that folder were essentially ignored by git. I could create as many notes as I wanted and it would remain on my local computer, nowhere else.
Hopefully, this helps you on your note-taking journey, but more importantly, I hope it helps you learn your code in the way that you learn best.