vscode - how to get file search (not content) to include (git-) ignored files

As the screenshot in this answer shows, vscode uses rules in both .gitignore and .ignore. Since Git only recognizes .gitignore, we can negate some rules in .ignore to bring them back in the vscode search result.

A demo:

.gitignore

.env.local

.ignore

!.env.local

This trick also works for tools like rg and fd.

Don't know if this was still useful but one way I found out is. There was a search.exclude setting in the settings.json

Nornally we would use it to exclude pattern by set it to true. However, we could force the inclusion of excluded pattern by setting the rule as false

{
    "files.exclude": {
        "**/*.asset":true,
        "**/*.mat":true,
        "**/*.meta":true,
        "**/*.prefab":true,
        "**/*.unity":true,
    },
    "search.exclude": {
        "**/*.asset":false,
        "**/*.mat":false,
        "**/*.meta":false,
        "**/*.prefab":false,
        "**/*.unity":false,
    }
}

This is my setting for unity project and this was made all the meta files that was ignored missing from explorer. But I still be able to searching its content

If you want ctrl+P and ctrl+shift+F (Search feature) to function the same, here's the three options I use.

Add this to your .vscode/settings.json file:

{
   "explorer.excludeGitIgnore": false,
   "search.useParentIgnoreFiles": false,
   "search.useIgnoreFiles": false
}

This works well in a project with git submodules where you edit the main repo and the submodules at the same time.

For an intentionally temporary work around (i.e. so as to avoid altering settings):

Press ctrl + ` to open terminal, then:

code my-ignored-file.txt

that will open the ignored file, and has the little advantage of tab complete (which the Quick Open menu doesn't for ignored files).