All that's needed to implement this is to add a require_git setting to the file picker settings so you can control ignore::WalkBuilder::require_git. That setting default to true in ignore which is the reason why gitignore file outside of git repositories are ignored.

Note that we support global gitignore rules¹ so setting this to false would cause those to be always active aswell so if we make this configurable in helix it should still default to true

I can work on this over the next day or two!

I've created a pull request with this feature!

I just want to note, that even currently, outside of a git folder, .ignore is correctly applied by default. Which is probably what most people want when looking for this.
Either way, this would be a simple and good addition. That whole ignore crate looks great.

I took jj (jujutsu) for a spin this weekend, and noticed that Helix ignored .gitignore (🥁). Jujutsu uses .gitignore too, and even though it is git compatible, it has its own .jj folder instead of .git.

I worked around this by symlinking .gitignore as .ignore, but it would be nice if it was picked up automatically even though its not really a git repo.

Unsure about how often you have a .gitignore that you don't want to affect Helix. Maybe a better default would be to always parse .gitignore.