git-nuke

What?

git-nuke is a Rust binary that provides a more reliable version of git clean -dXf for Windows, though it may be useful for other platforms.

How?

Install with cargo install git-nuke and run with git nuke in a git working directory root, or passing that directory as an argument (running in a subdirectory probably won't do what you want, that may be addressed in a future update if anyone cares).

Why?

git clean -dXf will clear out every ignored file in a git working directory, returning it to a clean state. Unfortunately, it does not yet understand Windows' directory junctions, so in node monorepos / workspaces where projects use them to reference the local code as a dependency, git clean -dXf will sometimes delete the source code!

It's also absurdly slow (at least on Windows), and can use gigabytes of memory in large repositories, which Rust makes trivial to fix.

Since it was pretty easy to add, I also put in showing a progress indicator for removing directories. There's probably plenty of improvements here...