After setting up the beginnings of the chess game in my IDE I found that there were a lot of files that I accidentally committed but did not need committing as they were related to the IDE. The others in the group are using different IDE’s and have no need to see those files related to my IDE. Adding the folders to .gitignore wasn’t enough to remove what was already committed and pushed to GitHub.

After searching around StackOverflow I came across this post which pointed me in the right direction. I ended up using the command suggested by Nate in response to the accepted answer. I’m not keen on copying/pasting but figured that since I won’t be pushing any updates until I see it works then this will be fine. If everything broke, I could just re-clone the project.

The command I used:

git ls-files -i -z --exclude-from=.gitignore | xargs -0 git rm --cached