⚡ TL;DR

You can use negative filters like

git diff ':!*.lock'
git status ':!*.lock'

and on attributes:

git status ':(attr:!linguist-generated !linguist-vendored)'

You can even combine those patterns.

Excluding on a glob

I sometimes have many changes over multiple files in a Git repository. And then I want to display only the changes made to files in the src/ directory:

git diff '*/src/*'

Or, more interesting, I want all changes except those made to lock files:

git diff ':!*.lock'

Note that in the above examples, patterns are quoted, so that the shell does not expand the glob itself. Here, Git is interpreting the patterns¹. This feature is called “pathspec”.

Diving into pathspec

That feature can be used with commands like git ls-files, git status, git grep… And you can do more than exclude globs.

The above :!*.lock is actually a short form of :(exclude)*.lock. And quite a few other keywords exist, like top to force a match on the full path from the root of the repository, icase for a case insensitive match or attr to place particular constraints on the attributes of a file.

For example, you can use the linguist attributes understood by GitHub and other forges locally with:

• ':(attr:!linguist-generated !linguist-vendored)' matches files that have neither of these linguist attributes,
• ':(attr:linguist-generated)' ':(attr:linguist-vendored)' matches files with either attribute²,
• and that can be combined with file patterns and other attributes, like ':(icase,attr:linguist-vendored)*/LOCK' which would match a file named lock or Lock or even LoCk if it has the linguist-vendored attribute.

The manual contains even more details, like attributes gotchas, matching without interpreting globs…. Have fun!