I often find myself leaving out a change set of local changes that I don’t want to check in. In Idea, you can add them to a separate change list of local changes and ignore them from commits. On the command line, you can do a local ignore/untrack of a file, whithout using .gitignore. Useful if your .gitignore is also itself checked into git.
nelanka@hydra:/Projects/booking> git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.