improving docs, adding .idea to gitignore

[jposada202020]

As title describes

Built locally to verify

[jepler]

I don't know what ".idea" is, so this is based on my guess, but: please consider: for files created by your particular development environment, you can put the patterns in a "global ignore" file so that they are ignored in every git repository you place on your system.

One philosophy of .gitignore is that the project one is for files created by interacting with the project in "the standard way", like building and testing the software. An advantage of this philosophy is that it's not scalable to put the patterns for every development environment in every git repo, especially since having many patterns can slow git down (though this is much better than it used to be, at least on linux), and you don't have to make a special request in each project you want to contribute to!

In the CircuitPython modules, we like for all the various files like .gitignore, .github/workflows/build.yml, etc., to have exactly the same content whenever possible, so that doing mass updates of these files can be done by simple patches, so we also think it could reduce effort for us in the long run.

For more details and how-to, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7335420/global-git-ignore https://docs.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-github/ignoring-files#configuring-ignored-files-for-all-repositories-on-your-computer and other resources that an internet search can find!

[jposada202020]

@jepler Valid Points. Thanks
However this is included in other libraries already as well. Just to put a few

• ltr390
  https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_LTR390/blob/df431ed7dd08e116abe14f5b684f813b19448153/.gitignore#L6

• AD7410
  https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_ADT7410/blob/a5eae664530a1bc01f1819a140cffd1e6ed3ebfe/.gitignore#L6

• irremote
  https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_IRRemote/blob/d8260f2fe2a8b3e874320483060756dce4c2a9ec/.gitignore#L6

• Blinka
  https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Blinka/blob/16848c1255d8b323a88500f11923a3b39777cf0b/.gitignore#L2

[kattni]

To clarify, @jposada202020 @jepler, .idea is the directory created when you start PyCharm from within a working directory. I use PyCharm, and am definitely responsible for adding it to some of the libraries. It is fine to add it for now if you run into it.

I am going to file an issue on cookiecutter to suggest updating our .gitignore to include the additional files added by popular IDEs, as we are running into this more often with more diverse folks contributing to the libraries. I feel we would benefit from a more robust .gitignore so folks are not forced to deal with these things locally.

[jposada202020]

@kattni thanks for the comments. will do