Our projects have configuration files that are checked into source control, essentially as a template, that the developers check out and modify with their local config changes, which shouldn't be checked back in.
Policies are already in place to prevent these local changes from being checked in by accident, but it's still very obnoxious to always have dozens of config files in the Pending Changes view of Team Explorer that I just always have to exclude.
.tfignore only seems to ignore Add operations, not Edits. After some searching I found that some people had success with cloaking the files/folders, but that hasn't worked for me.
The files can't be removed from source control - they exist there for a reason - however I'd really like to not have to see them as pending changes every time I go to check in my work.
Is this even possible?
No, it's not possible.
There isn't a way to ignore detecting the file changes which already been in source control, unless all the developers cloak the configuration files/folders with the workspace mapping, but that seems not available for you case.