On my personal project (A Rails app), I forgot to commit whilst working and continued working for many months since. I have changed quite a lot since the last commit and now I wish to get Git all back up and running and to use it properly but Tower is messing up due to it showing 55,000+ files in the Files to stage list. A lot of them seem to be files in directories that I don't want committed (like a node_modules directory) but those have since been deleted but they are still listed. Any action I try to take like stage or unstage or right click a file seems to take ages (as expected with this many I guess). I ahve tried adding certain things to my .gitignore file but they don;t seem to be having any effect.
I've learnt my lesson here and just want my git repo back up and running but need help getting it there.
Any suggestions?