[tomjakubowski]

It's useful for bespoke developer settings. I like to keep a scratch folder in virtually every repo I work on, so I have `/tomscratch` in my global excludes file. Adding this to .gitignore in every repo I work on would just be noise for everyone else.

[jjayj]

Similarly, I globally exclude `*.tmp`. I can pipe logs or anything else to some `example.tmp` and never worry about checking them in.

[dunham]

I've been putting a .gitignore file containing a single * inside my scratch directories. But ~/.gitignore sounds like a good idea for local things that I do in every repository.