I have a global .gitignore but files aren't being ignored, why?

Question

I have a .gitignore_global in my home directory

durrantm.../durrantm$ pwd
/home/durrantm
durrantm.../durrantm$ ls .git*
.gitconfig  .gitignore_global

The .gitignore_global has:

durrantm.../durrantm$ head .gitignore_global
# RubyMine #
.idea/

# Compiled source #
###################
*.dll
*.exe

# Logs and databases #
######################

but when I git status for a project I still end up getting the .idea files when I start using rubyMine.

So my git status still shows this:

#   modified:   .idea/dataSources.xml
#   modified:   .idea/linker.iml
#   modified:   .idea/misc.xml
#   modified:   .idea/workspace.xml

I have run git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global bvut it didn't help.

Solution

The gitignore man page doesn't mention of a global gitignore file.
Only of the global config core.excludesfile

But if the latter doesn't work, that might be because those files were previously added to the Git repo, in which case you must rm them.

git rm -r --cached .idea

See ".gitignore file not ignoring"