mercurial - How can I ignore all directories except one using .hgignore?

Question

I'm managing $HOME using Mercurial, to keep my dotfiles nice and tracked, or at least the ones that matter to me.

However, there's a profusion of files and directories in ~ that do not need to be tracked, and that set is ever-changing and ever-growing.

Historically, I've dealt with this by having this .hgignore:

syntax: glob
*

This keeps my status clean, as far as it goes, making only previously tracked files visible. However, I have some directories (in my case, scripts, .emacs.d) that I would like to see untracked files in; I almost always want to track new additions to those directories.

I know that I can run hg st -u scripts to identify untracked files, but I want a means whereby I can achieve the same function using plain ole hg status.

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

Try this in .hgignore instead:

syntax: regexp

^(?!(scripts|foo|bar)/)[^/]+/

• ^ matches start of path
• (?!(scripts|foo|bar) uses negative lookahead to ignore all files except those in directories scripts, foo or bar
• /) ensures that directories which have a tracked directory as a prefix are ignored
• [^/]+/ then actually matches any directory (excluding those ruled out by the lookahead), so that files in ~ aren't ignored

Credit for the central idea in this solution (the negative lookahead) goes to Michael La Voie's answer to this question