Why is my Ignore... option greyed out when I right click a file?
Asked by Randall Adams:

Sourcetree is ignoring my global .gitignore file so I'm trying to get it to ignore an individual file by right clicking it and selecting Ignore... The problem is that the Ignore... option is greyed out. Can anyone tell me why?

Thanks


Answers:
author: KieranA
body: Hi Randall,

You have to stop tracking the file before you can ignore it. You can simply right click on the file and hit "Stop Tracking". If you're in Git and you've got the staging view you should be able to right click on the same file (provided it has a blue question mark icon) and click "Ignore". If you're using Mercurial you'll need to commit the removed file first and it'll then re-appear as an uncommitted change from which point you can right click on that file and click "Ignore".

![](http://i.imgur.com/wY1yYh0.png)

Above is a screenshot of the state you need to get your file into in order to ignore it.

Hope that helps

comments: author: Randall Adams
body: Thank you Kieran! Worked for me!


author: Mark Linthicum
body: File jumps up to the "Staged Files" window when I" Stop Tracking".


author: Adas Lesniak
body: Thanks - very helpful. Btw - could be nice to have a feature like detecting what kind of project is that and popup (apply default ignore pattern?) for most popular tools.


author: Schroef
body: Stop tracking is also greyed out. Adding in the settings under diff pattern also doesnt work


author: Schroef
body: Strange thing, i need to stage it first, then i can stop tracking it... What is that for weird behavior?

well still not, then it jumps back to unstagged files... what is this for shit


author: K Diaz
body: Same as Ronaldo, I never got the blue question mark and couldn't stop tracking a file (I wanted to ignore .gitignore to maintain a custom version in my working folder without overwriting the repo .gitignore)

I ended up fixing the issue from the console following the accepted answer @ [](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20525055/how-to-ignore-existing-file-in-git-using-source-tree)<http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20525055/how-to-ignore-existing-file-in-git-using-source-tree>

Short version:

    git update-index --assume-unchanged .gitignore



author: Ronaldo Santana
body: That did not work for me. Stop tracking and the file moves to the other box but still no question mark icon. Cannot ignore. Also, My ignore file is ignored for the repo. Why is that?

comments: author: Mark Linthicum
body: File jumps up to the "Staged Files" window when i Stop Tracking.


author: xdev
body: Too late - but thank you anyway...


author: xdev
body: What's the difference between "stop tracking" and "add to gitignore"?

-\> .gitignore file will be transmitted to the git repo, and the other developers will get it with the new entries to ignore?

-\> "stop tracking" will only be applied on the client-side - so no distribution to the git repo?

thank you for your feedbacks.

<br />

regards, jan


author: geometrikal
body: I had to close and re-open the tab for a repo to make the "ignore" option appear on right click for the question mark files. Closing and re-opening SourceTree did not work.