Sometimes people don’t agree on the contents of the tracked .hgignore file in the repository root. For example, I don’t like having *orig in .hgignore as having backup files show up when I grep is annoying. I solved that problem by removing the *orig pattern and telling other repository users about hg purge.

But today I found another way to deal with different opinions for ignore files. Hidden away on the Mercurial wiki is a nice tip about per-user hgignore files. In a repository’s hgrc you can reference an arbitrary file to be used in addition to the tracked .hgignore file. No more .hgignore wars!