You basically make your home dir a git repo and by default ignore everything inside it. When you want to store a dotfile in that repo, you have to force add it

You basically make your home dir a git repo and by default ignore everything inside it. When you want to store a dotfile in that repo, you have to force add it (`git add -f`) and it will be tracked. You can learn more about how git ignores things here: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore https://git-scm.com/docs/gitignore