Is it normal to have the home directory under git?

I've just found out that my home directory is under the supervision of Git, i.e. there's a .git folder in my home directory.

My questions are:

  1. Is it normal that my home directory is under Git?

  2. If it is not normal:

    1. what's your advisable way of removing it from the supervision of Git? Should I just remove the .git folder?

    2. What could have caused it to become a git repository?

  3. Is it a good idea to have it under Git?

It was basically Intellij who made me notice this, because it tells me:

18:10 Unregistered VCS root detected The directory /Users/cell is under Git, but is not registered in the > Settings.

where clearly /Users/cell is my home directory.

It also tells me "Unregistered VCS root" and is doing some work in the background...

I've just Intellij because I wanted to start learning Scala, so the only thing I installed before creating a new project was to install the Scala plugin.


No, it is not normal for your home directory to be under git.

To remove just rm -rf .git

It is not a good idea to have it all under git as there are files like caches, trash that you do not want under a version control.
Theoretically, you could exclude them in .gitignore but I don't think this is practical and it makes it difficult for you to put other git projects in your home directory.

As to how it happened, we can't say. Something or someone made a git repo on your home directory.

For keeping configuration files under git look at the various git repos of dotfiles.