Symptom
An agent ran git rm on an editor's settings directory, "cleaning up local settings." From the next pull, the setting (a graph-view colour palette, say) was gone on every device.
Cause
The file was a deliberately tracked shared setting, whitelisted through a ! exception in .gitignore. The rest of the directory was untracked, so the one whitelisted file went unnoticed, and the folk rule "editor settings are local" justified the git rm. Deleting a tracked file travels with the commit. It is not a local cleanup, it is a delete on every machine.
Fix
Check tracking intent before deleting.
git ls-files <path>: any output means it is trackedgit check-ignore -v <path>: a matching ! rule means someone explicitly decided to track itA whitelisted file does not get deleted. To change the value, edit the file and commit. The rest of the directory's untracked files stay untracked, which is correct.
Verify
Before committing a deletion, list it with git diff --cached --diff-filter=D --name-only and run git check-ignore -v on each path. No ! match may appear.
★ A tracked file is one somebody decided to track. A whitelist entry is a decision, not an accident.