A starting point, not the canonical templates

GitHub's own gitignore template collection is exhaustive by design — hundreds of entries per stack covering every IDE quirk and build artifact anyone has ever reported. This tool intentionally trades that completeness for a compact, curated set of the entries that actually matter for the common case, on the theory that a short list someone will actually read and understand beats a 200-line file copied in without a second glance. For a project with unusual tooling or unusual build artifacts, treat the output here as a starting point to extend, not a final, exhaustive answer.

Why merging templates deduplicates automatically

Combining more than one template — a language stack plus an editor plus an OS — inevitably produces overlapping lines (multiple templates ignoring `.env`, for instance), and a naive concatenation would just repeat them. Deduplicating on the fly keeps the combined file readable and avoids the small but real confusion of seeing the same ignore pattern listed under two different section headers, which is a minor but recurring annoyance in hand-assembled .gitignore files.