I made a small utility for listing the file names inside an archive file, e.g. tar, zip, etc. This comes in handy when you download some software package using the command line but you aren’t sure whether to extract it in its own folder because you don’t know what the file structure inside is.
You never want build artifacts to be committed. You don’t want to have everyone working on your project to need to setup their own gitignore for every project. So it makes sense to have a common commited gitignore for files the project produces that should never be tracked by git.
I dislike when people put in editor files in the gitignore though. People should setup global ones for their local tooling.