### Discussed in https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions/4054

<div type='discussions-op-text'>

<sup>Originally posted by **jimjam-slam** January 22, 2023</sup>
Starter templates can [include a .quartoignore](https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/starter-templates.html#creating-a-template) file to manually specify which files to exclude from the template. It says it uses a `.gitignore`-type syntax, but one omission from this is that it doesn't appear to support a negation operator `!` to force Quarto to include a file that would otherwise be excluded using its default settings.

In my case, I'd like to include a `.gitignore` with my template, as it's designed to work with other file types, and I'd like to suggest to my users which files they should ignore (eg. `node_modules`) and which they should version control (eg. `.luarc.json`).

It'd be great if I could add `!.gitignore` to `.quartoignore` to force my suggested git ignore to be included with the template!</div>
dragonstyle
2023-01-23T11:51:56Z
dragonstyle
enhancement
v1.3
closed
Feature request: support negation operator for .quartoignore
https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/issues/4061