I have ran the following in cmd
git rm -r --cached .
to remove any files that have been committed and shouldn't have. I then added this to my .gitignore file:
settings_local.py
*.pyc
which should ignore any .pyc files and the local settings file. However, when I try and scan for changed files in git, it finds them!
Anything already committed will still be recognized by git even if they would be otherwise ignored by the .gitignore. Once you have run git rm --cached, you still have to commit the deletion of those files. They should be ignored from then on, unless you forcibly re-add them.