Your comments

I'm using HEAD checkouts myself, but I also had to resort to the Recyclable Commits various times, because I lost my changes after committing, then switching back somewhere else. IMHO, it's an unsafe feature and we shouldn't support making this the default.

I'm wondering whether ".gitignore in repository root directory" would be appropriate default anyway?

As the Git docs state, "core.ignoreCase" is not expected to be changed by the user [1]: Git relies on the proper configuration of this variable for your operating and file system. Modifying this value may result in unexpected behavior.

[1] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config.txt-coreignoreCase

Sorry, Chris, I should have read more carefully.

Seems to be a duplicate of https://smartgit.userecho.com/communities/1/topics/124-?

If so, please vote and comment there, then I will close this topic as duplicate.

This topic is about files from commits, not local (or Index) files.