Thanks for bringing this to light. I, too, am wanting to use git in this way; in my case for an easy way of keeping my local dev code branch synced between my work/desktop and home/laptop.
I find it counter-intuitive that there is a secret “exclusions list” that we would’ve had no clue except for trial-and-error and then googling to find this forum.
By default, when using a program which claims to sync all files in a folder, as Joe Q. User, I expect it to sync all the files in that folder, not to have a hidden “exclusions” list which I can neither see nor edit.
Sorry to come across as a downer, but I guess I was disappointed to find this, right when I’d just upgraded to the “premium” version so I could feel safer in putting sensitive code into an encrypted folder. So, just adding my +1 here and trying to describe how I think most users would find this secret hidden exclusion list.
What else is excluded that we don’t know about?
Is it all .folders starting with a dot in the name? If so, that could cause a lot of other headaches, too, especially when one of the sync targets is a unix-like system … plenty of handy and wanted stuff is stored in hidden “dot”-folders.
Is there some use case that we’re not thinking of that would benefit from this hidden exclusion list?
PS. Thanks for making such a useful and handy product.
UPDATE: found an explanation here as to why .git folders were being excluded.
I can see how that might bite some people in the butt, but I think that nerfing it so that .git folders aren’t synced at all is probably going to frustrate more in the long run. The gotchas of dealing with the presence of .git folders is just something that one would need to handle as part of the learning curve in using git in that fashion, and I think users would accept that, and not expect their file-syncing tool to try and hide it from them.
(unless there was some way exposed that we could all customize our own exclusion patterns)