Today I learned about the --skip-worktree command in git which will treat a file like it hasn’t been modified. This is useful if you have to modify a file locally but don’t ever want to commit it (config files are a common scenario). Like me, you may have seen --assume-unchanged used in this way but that’s not what it’s meant for since it’s “designed for cases where it is expensive to check whether a group of files have been modified”. As a result you’re likely to lose the changes you have made to those files. This post shows a good summary of the outcomes of common operations with each command.